Diablo IV Introduces Improved Dye System For Armor Sets

Blizzard has announced more new features coming to Diablo IV, including improvements to its Dye system.

The reveal was made in the latest issue of the Quarterly Diablo IV update, where the developers of the Diablo team periodically update the general public on the progress of the game’s development.

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In Diablo III, gear could be dyed, changing certain colors on it. However this only affected certain regions of the gear, so having a cohesive color scheme would still prove a challenge for certain pieces of gear.

According to Arnaud Kotelnikoff, lead Character Artist on Diablo IV walked us through the process, saying that now every part of a piece of gear would be customizable.

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An example of the level of color customization in Diablo IV. Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment

However, the team had to work around one constraint, the game’s Physics -based Rendering. According to Kotelnikoff, while the sytem allowed for colors to display more realistically, it did get in the way of applying certain colors to certain material types:

“This system was challenging to implement because materials such as metal do not allow themselves to be dyed with inappropriate colors when they follow PBR rules. To address this, we added data to our armor that identifies specific material types and tells the dye system what color goes on what material, such as leather, fabric, metal, and other specific surfaces”, Kotelnikoff says. “The result is armor that is dyable in a range of colors that still feeling grounded and realistic in the world we’re building for Diablo IV”.

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Diablo IV Rogue — An example of the Rogue armor set on the two different player models

Aside from the dye system in Diablo IV, Kotelnikoff also explained how armor sets would be largely the same withing the same player class, with only minor changes for the character’s body type. On top of that, the game would use Detail Mapping to allow the models to look better when zoomed in.

“This is just scratching the surface of what’s to come in Diablo IV in terms of character customization. The team is dedicated to delivering the best quality possible, and we hope that players will enjoy all the options we have available for customizing their characters in Diablo IV”.