Proto Color

Blender add-on that replaces the New Material → pick a color → assign → repeat loop. Turn any palette image into a full set of materials, color your blockout face by face with a hotkey, then pack every color you used into a single texture atlas — or into vertex colors — so a twenty-material scene arrives in Unreal, Unity, or Godot as one material and one texture.

palette image  →  materials  →  colored blockout  →  atlas  →  engine

Recorded on the standalone PROTO:COLOR add-on, before it merged with PROTO:PALETTE. The workflow is the same; the panel now has the two tabs described below.

In Blender it appears as PROTO:COLOR, one panel in the 3D View sidebar with two tabs: Color Palette for building and assigning, Merge Materials for baking the result down. They are two halves of one workflow — the first gets color onto the mesh fast, the second makes what you built cheap to render.

What you get

• Palettes from anything. Point it at a screenshot, a photo, or a pixel-art strip and it counts the colors, keeps the most common ones, optionally merges near-duplicates, and sorts them around the hue wheel — see the Color tab.
• Fill a selection, or paint face by face. Assign a swatch to everything selected at once, or turn the palette into a brush and drag color across the model — Ctrl+click samples what's already there. See Fill and Paint.
• Assign without leaving the viewport. Ctrl+Q opens a swatch picker at the mouse, and follows whichever mode you're in.
• A palette library that follows you. Saved palettes are files in your Blender config directory, not scene data, so a palette saved in one .blend is available in every other one. Imports Lospec, GIMP, Adobe, Paint.NET and plain PNG strips — details.
• One texture for the whole blockout. Merge Materials packs every flat color into a square atlas and points a dedicated SwatchUV layer at the right cell. Optional ORM and emissive companions.
• Your UVs are never touched. Swatch UVs go on their own layer, and channel 0 is protected so tangents and lightmaps keep a sane basis.
• Reversible. The original per-face material assignment is snapshotted as a mesh attribute, so Restore Original Materials survives subdivision, loop cuts, and most other topology edits.

Start here

Getting started	Palette to colored blockout in five steps
The Color tab	Generating, assigning, and cleaning up materials
Merge Materials	Atlas and vertex-color baking
Requirements & installation	Blender 4.2–5.2 and setup

Taking it to an engine

The atlas is only half the job — cell size, filtering, and mipmaps decide whether your colors survive the trip. Read Engine export before you ship anything to UE5 or Unity.