Palette Variants

Palette variants are ArcBrush’s most powerful feature. Define a palette of named colors, wire it through Palette Remap, and automatically generate every color variant of your asset.

How It Works

1. Create a Palette node with named color slots (e.g., “Crimson”, “Cobalt”, “Emerald”).
2. Connect your source image to a Palette Remap node.
3. Connect the Palette to Palette Remap’s palette input.
4. Palette Remap generates one variant per palette slot, shifting hue and saturation while preserving luminance.
5. Connect the variants output to Export Batch to save all variants as named files.

Key Concepts

• Luminance preservation ensures highlights stay highlights and shadows stay shadows. The recolor looks painted, not tinted.
• Named exports turn each palette slot name into part of the filename (e.g., gem_crimson.png).
• Live updates mean that changing the source art or the palette causes all variants to regenerate automatically.
• Palette From Image can auto-extract colors from any reference image to use as your palette.

Common Workflows

• Game assets: One item icon → 12 color tiers for rarity levels.
• Brand assets: One design → variants in every brand color.
• Character art: One character → color explorations for different costumes.

Palette Remap vs. Color Remap

These two nodes sound similar but solve different problems:

• Palette Remap is the variant generator. Wire in a Palette and it produces one image per palette slot, output on the Variants pin. Use it whenever you want a set of recolored versions of the same source.
• Color Remap is a single-color hue/saturation shifter. Wire in an image and pick a single replacement color — it produces one image on the standard image pin. No Palette node, no variants, no Export Batch.

If you want N variants, reach for Palette Remap. If you just want to swap one color for another in a single image, Color Remap is simpler and faster.