Creating such a large open world environment on the PS3 created some very difficult texture memory issue to resolve. With a Comic book IP I knew that we could use the look to our advantage and tint most of the materials we use in the game. I took that concept a step further and separated windows from the tiling backgrounds textures, such as brick so that we could composite them together in the material, tint and adjust other property's and save 10x the memory while still able to get a large variety of color and architecture design in the textures. We were even able to use concrete textures and tune them, to look like metal. 90% of the Textures in the image below are grayscale and tined in in the shader.

This is a screen shot of just a small portion of the material library in our editor. The important thing to note is that the 49 different looks you see here is really only 10 textures. There's 1 background texture and 9 Window overlay textures.

The following section explains how I set up Textures and the basic principles behind the construction of the shader and its power on saving texture memory on a console.