Quick Color Chooser

Suggest new features for Stella.
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Nordehylop
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Quick Color Chooser

Post by Nordehylop » Wed May 15, 2013 12:12 am

Just getting back into paper modeling, and thought of what I think would be a very useful feature.

The coloring tools are currently usable, but a little tough to operate. I propose a simple recoloring window wherein you can see the current colors in the model and remap them to new colors all at once.

For instance, I'm playing around with a stellation of the rhombicosidodecahedron right now, and turned on the dodecahedral 6-color scheme and icosahedral 5-color. I would like to turn all the dodecahedral faces to slightly different shades of blue, and the icosahedral to shades of red, but the way the coloring is set up now this takes a very long time. If I just had a 2x11 array of the colors as they are now and could fill in the colors that I would like them to be, I could accomplish this in seconds.

Not a huge deal by any means -- I have the patience to color nonconvex snubs face-by-face, which takes for.ev.er -- but it would be a nice feature to get models that looked pretty on screen.
It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black.

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robertw
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Re: Quick Color Chooser

Post by robertw » Thu May 16, 2013 11:19 am

Maybe I can't picture what you mean, but it doesn't sound like a huge saving to me. You'd still have to select each colour in turn and tweak RGB levels to pick a new colour for each one. You may also have trouble matching the original colours in the list with faces. Doesn't seem much harder to simply select the face (Left+click) and change the colour (C for all faces of that colour or Ctrl+C for just one face).

I do think colour selection could be improved though, and one day I'll get around to it, if I can hone in on a good system. For example, what you might want to do is specify a starting colour and an ending colour and generate a range of colours between them to apply to either all faces or all faces of a given type. That would fill all your dodecahedral or icosahedral faces in one step, and be sure the colours are evenly spread. If it could be set as a default from then on, subsequent models you load would instantly inherit the same scheme. So I've thought about it a bit, but nothing definite.

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