>>90129915In theory, should this palette method work, I should only end up with a dozen or so. Maybe less.
Basically, I take the UV for entire sections I want to color and scale it to fit a gradient or solid color on a texture (the palette). It's simple, and looks a bit cartoony, but I can make very fast models with a fair amount of visual appeal, especially if I used gradients, like I did for the violet flower I did a test run on.
The UV manipulation is also why I can't use normals on the same object without a second UV map. It's not a spatial positioning of the palette UV, but one based on colorization, so a normals texture would look extremely squashed or weird.
But, making stuff like bricks, or other repetitive surfaces, aren't possible, since you'll need to really ramp up the geometry. So, I'm aiming just to use a little bit to give the impression of bricks, like a image artist might do with negative space.
