In essence, I'm attempting to amass a compendium of building palettes for those of us who don't understand reasonable block choices in builds. I'll be making the sample palettes in my Apprentice build on the Creative server. I couldn't think of anything to build at the time, so I'm attempting to make a tutorial in the style of a museum/art gallery. Maybe not 100% necessary ingame, but some of the ideas I have for it should be useful at some point. Ideally, each submission should be at least 6 blocks, and a maximum of 20, and the use of each block indicated. Example: Ceograch's Medieval style. StoneBrick - Foundation Oak log - Frame White wool - Walls Oak stairs - roof Spruce planks - floor Light Grey glass frames - windows (Sidenote: I like them because they give a slightly dirty impression like real life windows) Preferably I would like to at some point have another Medieval style, modern, organic and so on. Basically just a palette a newcomer can use to help them. Thank you for reading this; this is my first post on your forums.
If you provide a version of any of this and/or the theory in-game I might add it to the new tutorial which will be constructed at some point in the near future. That being said for the purpose of this thread, here is my contribution for now: When making a palette, you need a good understanding of; the colour wheel, how it is used, and why. http://colorschemedesigner.com/ this is a good starting point if you don't know the theory. The colour wheel is essentially made of two halves, 'cold' and 'hot'. Blues, greens, and purples represent the 'cold' side and red, yellow, and oranges represent the 'hot' half. Mono is your main colour choice. Compliment is the opposite colour on the wheel, provides contrast in colour without looking ridiculous. Triad is where you split the compliment colour either side of itself to produce two highlight blocks, this is a good way of bringing in more colour without messing up the main choice. Tetrad, this is pretty crazy, and I tend to avoid it. The only time it would likely be used is in a crazy pastel build, or if we got a wider spectrum of coloured blocks in the game. Analogue is great for themed builds, the colours are adjacent in the colour wheel and match nicely. If you pick a 'cold' main colour, you get a cold theme and vice versa (refer to point 1). Analogue is my personal favoutrite choice in designing a palette. Accented analouge is pretty self explanatory (Analogue + Compliment). After understanding the theory, try laying out all the blocks you have in a colour wheel and match them to their respective 'wedge' (I'm working on this for tutorial, and will update with pictures soon). If you use a resource pack, this will change and you will have to move stuff around. Finally, you also have the grey scale. This is pretty easy to deal with, you will only ever use analogue or compliment (mono doesn't really count, since using just one type of grey scale block is silly imo). As was stated earlier, using too many blocks is a big no-no for the most part. However, this can be avoided through hyper-scaling a build. The bigger the scale, the smoother you will be able to design a gradient. However, you may sacrifice the up close and personal look of the build (normally megabuilds are designed to be admired from a distance to soak it all up, but some people care). Another thing you must consider is texture, every block has it's unique texture (stating the obvious, but hey). Some of these textures can be catagorised as 'noisy', or obnoxious; sponge, cobblestone, brick, soulsand etc. you want to limit the amount of these blocks you use drastically, keep them to; highlights, gradients, or break them up with similarly shaded blocks. Once again, the negatives of texture are dampened by hyper-scaling. Another point on texture, however this mostly relates to organics, sometimes you should use noisy textures to your advantage. e.g. using something like stone brick to give the illusion of scales on a dragon. Once you have the theory down it is actually really easy to create a palette, and if you lay out a colour wheel you make your life easy in future (again, there will soon be one at the tutorial section). I've missed some stuff out, but that's the basics for the most part, and all you really need to know (might have missed something basic, if so let me know). I'll try and update this post with pictures and a few basic palettes in the near future. Hope this helped.
Can i throw my opinion in here? Nice! First of all a block palette you basically cant fail with is the classic Cobble-Wood combination. Its almost endlessly expandable because you can use every block made of wood or stone and add wool and flowers and even abstract things like ladders and so on and so on. I think its called Steampunk and it looks awesome when done good but can also be pretty boring because it was already done a million times. Another palette i often use is the combination of all kinds of stone except those ugly red bricks and i normally add clay. Well you take these stones and add two other colours: I often choose quartz and a wool block. Stone is a material that has everything to make great detail and depth if you use it right and the others two colours are used for roofs or just to make accents. These are two basic palettes that are used most and are very nice. But they are just basic and need to be used very cool if you wanna build something outstanding with them. If you dont want to use cobble or wood because its too mainstream i think a good basic is quartz. Yes Quartz! You have everything you need when you use quartz. 3 kinds of blocks, stairs and slabs. And you can combine it great with water and any other white and grey/black block you can find. Glowstone is an awesome addition. Talking of glowstone: I know not everybody is the same opinion with me here, but i think glowstone is one of the coolest materials in minecraft (you can also use redstone lamps, but its more complicated to implement them and they just looks a little bit better). The problem is: just glowstone is ugly as hell. The nice things are: Glowstone creates the coolest light effect possible. Hidden behind water or stained glass it looks very good. You can use glowstone anywhere but you always need to hide it: Use the light effects not the block. At last i wanna say that you can use many many many block combinations in minecraft. Try to be creative. If have 3 rules i always use: 1. More than 3 colours. 2. More than 3 different blocks (stairs and slabs dont count as single block). 3.Dont use just blocks, use stairs, fences, walls, flowers.... Hope i could at least help a bit and that this isnt too messy. ~Killor (im back, yay!)