A simple Blender add-on that makes working with vertex colors easier.
- 👁️ Preview vertex colors (including alpha!) from object and edit modes
- 🖌️ Various tools, including simple selection fill, random color generator, and a gradient generator
- 🎨 Supports editing different color attributes
- 🎭 RGBA color masking, modify only the channels you need
There are two ways to install the add-on: via Blender's extensions or manually. Let's take a look at each option.
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Download the latest version of the package
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Inside Blender go to Edit -> Preferences -> Get Extensions
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Click on the down arrow at the top right corner
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Press "Install from Disk..."
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Selected the downloaded package
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Enjoy ✨
- Inside Blender go to Edit -> Preferences -> Get Extensions
- In the search box type "More Colors!"
- Click "Install"
- You're awesome ✨
After installing the add-on, you can see it on the side panel (press N to open it). It should look something like this: 
As you can see, it consists of several main sections, including About, Settings and Tools sections.
Contains general info about the plugin such as add-on name and version, as well as a link to this documentation.
Contains various settings, including display settings and global color settings.
With display settings, you can choose, how vertex colors will be displayed. You can view their RGB or Alpha channels. Make sure it's not disabled before using any of the tools!
The add-on has two settings here: a color mask and a reset colors button.
With the color mask, you can restrict, which RGBA channels are affected by add-on tools. Every channel is on by default, which means colors are applied as usual. But imagine you left only the red channel on. In this case, only the red channel values will be modified, and values on other channels will not be affected. Why do we need this? Well, you can use different color channels to store different information that will be used later (for instance in shaders). As an example, your red channel might be a position gradient, your blue channel might be some kind of a mask, and so on.
A reset colors button just sets all vertex colors to white.
In this panel, you can select, which color attribute will be affected by the tool. If your object has no color attributes, the plugin will create one automatically for you!
Contains all the tools the add-on has to offer. At the moment it has a Simple Fill, a Random Color Per Element, and a Color By Position tool.
It applies a selected color to the selected object(s) or selected parts of the mesh (points, edges, or faces). Also has four preset colors, you can assign them as your main color with a select button, or immediately apply them to the mesh with a quick apply button.
Applies a random color to the selected object(s). Doesn`t support applying colors to parts of the mesh!
There are several elements per which random colors will be generated:
- Points
- Vertices
- Faces
- Islands
Also, you can choose, how colors will be generated. There are three modes: RGB, Hue, and Palette.
RGB random colors are colors, where each component (red, green, and blue values) are independently generated numbers in a range from zero to one.
Hue random colors are generated by creating an HSV (hue, saturation, value) color representation first, randomizing the hue value, and then converting it back to RGB space. It produces more distinct results, which might be useful for ID maps for example.
Palette random colors assigns randomly selected colors from a 4-color palette that you define. It might be useful if you want to use specific colors for the randomization.
Generates a gradient, based on vertex position along a selected direction. You can choose between generating a gradient in the object's local space (rotation affects the direction of the gradient) or in world space (object rotation doesn't affect the gradient direction).
Since Blender doesn't have a built-in feature to display the alpha channel of vertex colors, I had to use a special material for that. When you enable alpha display mode, this material temporarily overrides all active object materials. If you have different materials assigned to various parts of your geometry, alpha display mode will reassign them, so be careful with that.
Also, if you change an active object or color attribute, the material will not update automatically and you have to manually re-enable alpha display mode to see the updates.
Color attributes might have two domains: vertex and face corner. The vertex domain stores colors per point (for instance a cube has 8 points), while the face corner domain stores colors per vertex (a cube has 24 vertices, 3 per point). It sounds confusing, but the thing is a face corner domain gives you much more control over vertex colors, so I recommend using only it.
Still, the plugin supports vertex domain, but some tools will be limited, for instance, you will lose the ability to choose the element random colors will be applied.
Licensed under GNU General Public License, Version 3.0, LICENSE or https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
Some ideas are inspired by Ethan Simon-Law`s Vertex Color Plus addon, check it out as well!