The Color tab
The Color Palette tab turns an image into a set of flat materials and gets them onto your mesh.
Generate Materials
Set Image Path to any image and press Generate Materials. The add-on counts every color in the image, keeps the most common ones, optionally merges near-duplicates, sorts the result, and creates one flat Principled material per color.
Materials are tagged with a proto_color_swatch property when they are created, and carry a stable proto_color_uid. That means swatch links survive renames and the .001 suffixes Blender appends — and Clean Up can tell your materials apart from generated ones no matter what anything is named.
Tool Settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Swatch Columns | 4 | Swatches per row in the panel grid (2–10) |
| Merge Similar Colors | off | Collapse near-duplicate colors during extraction |
| Color Threshold | 20 | How different two colors must be to both survive. Higher means fewer, more distinct colors. Only active when merging is on |
| Auto-Sort on Generate | on | Sort extracted colors instead of leaving them in frequency order |
| Sort Colors | By Hue | Ordering: By Hue (around the color wheel, like classic pixel-art palettes), By Lightness, By Saturation, or By Frequency (most common first, no reorder) |
Merge Similar Colors is what makes photographs and painted artwork usable as palette sources. A clean pixel-art strip does not need it; a screenshot almost always does.
More Options
Collapsed by default — these are set-once preferences rather than per-generate controls.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Allow More Than 64 Colors | Lifts the 64-color cap and uses every unique color in the image |
| Allow Object Mode Assignment | Lets Assign apply to the whole object when you are not in Edit Mode |
| Clean Up Only Unused Materials | Restricts Clean Up to materials no object is using |
| Lock Palette Colors | Makes the swatch color fields read-only, so you cannot nudge a color by accident. A padlock shows beside each swatch |
| Show Remove Buttons | Adds a small ✕ to each swatch for removing individual colors |
Their starting values come from the add-on preferences, so you can set them once for every new scene.
Fill and Paint
A Fill / Paint switch sits above the swatch grid. It changes only how color reaches the mesh — the palette, the presets, and every swatch are shared between the two.
| Mode | How color lands |
|---|---|
| Fill (default) | Pick a swatch and it goes on the whole selection at once |
| Paint | Swatches become a brush you drag across faces, coloring them one at a time |
Reach for Fill when you have a face selection already — it is much the faster tool for large regions. Reach for Paint when you are working across a model face by face and selecting first would be busywork.
Fill
Each swatch shows its hex value, the color itself, and an Assign button.
- In Edit Mode, Assign applies the material to the selected faces.
- In Object Mode, it applies to the whole object, if Allow Object Mode Assignment is on.
Paint
Paint runs in Object Mode — the panel says so plainly if you are in Edit Mode, where Fill is the right tool anyway.
The mode box shows a Brush: row with the active color and its hex, then Start Painting. Once running, the button reads Painting — Esc to stop and the status bar carries the full set of controls:
| Input | What it does |
|---|---|
| Drag 🖱️ | Paint faces with the active color |
| Ctrl + Click | Pick up the color already on a face |
| [ / ] | Step the brush back and forward through the palette |
| Esc or right-click | Stop painting |
The cursor tells you which of those you are about to do: a brush over the mesh, an eyedropper the moment Ctrl goes down, and the normal pointer once you leave the viewport.
While painting, the swatch buttons read Select rather than Assign, and the active one stays visibly pressed. The sidebar and viewport navigation both stay live, so you can orbit, zoom, and change color without dropping the brush.
The first color on a fresh object
Painting onto an object with no material slots colors the whole object, because a single slot is all every face can index. From the second color onward it paints per face. That is how Blender assigns materials, not something the add-on can work around — give the object any material first if it matters.
Quick Assign
Ctrl+Q opens the palette as a menu at the mouse cursor — no trip to the sidebar. It follows the mode you are in:
- Fill — the color lands on the current selection.
- Paint — the color is loaded into the brush.
The shortcut is rebindable to any letter or digit with any combination of Ctrl, Shift, and Alt in preferences.
Editing the palette
The header above the swatch grid shows the active palette's name, an asterisk if it has unsaved changes, and the color count:
Dawnbringer 32 * (32 colors):Three buttons sit beside it:
| Button | Action |
|---|---|
| 💾 Save | Write changes back to the palette. Enabled only when there are unsaved changes, and never for bundled palettes |
| ⇅ Re-sort | Re-apply the current Sort Colors mode to the palette |
| ➕ Add | Append a color to the palette manually |
Bundled palettes are read-only by default; the save and re-sort buttons stay grayed out on them. If you want to edit one in place, enable Allow Editing Built-in Palettes in preferences — or just save it under a new name from the Palette Presets tab.
Clean Up
Cleanup Palette Materials deletes the materials this add-on created — and only those.
It matches on the proto_color_swatch property, not on a name prefix, so a material you happened to name Mat_Red is never at risk. With Clean Up Only Unused Materials on, it further limits itself to materials no object is currently using.