Appearance

Getting started ​

This walks the whole pipeline once: build a palette, color a blockout, bake it to a single texture.

1. Open the panel ​

In the 3D View press N to show the sidebar, then pick the ProtoTools tab. The panel is titled PROTO:COLOR and has two tabs of its own:

TabWhat it does
Color PaletteBuild a palette and assign materials face by face
Merge MaterialsBake every material color into one texture or into vertex colors

Start on Color Palette.

2. Build a palette ​

Set Image Path to any image — a game screenshot, a photo, a Lospec palette strip — and press Generate Materials.

Each color becomes a flat Principled material, and the swatch grid appears at the bottom of the panel.

Photos and painted artwork

Turn on Merge Similar Colors under Tool Settings first. Without it a photo yields hundreds of near-identical colors; with it you get a usable palette. Raise Color Threshold for fewer, more distinct colors.

No image handy? Open the Palette Presets tab and pick one of the bundled palettes — Dawnbringer 32 or Zughy 32 — from the Active Palette dropdown.

3. Assign colors ​

Two ways to get color onto the mesh, switched with the Fill / Paint control above the swatch grid.

Fill — the default. Select faces in Edit Mode, then either:

  • Click Assign under any swatch in the panel, or
  • Press Ctrl+Q to open the swatch picker right at your cursor and click a color.

Quick Assign is the one to build muscle memory for — it never makes you travel to the sidebar. The shortcut is rebindable.

In Object Mode the assignment applies to the whole object, as long as Allow Object Mode Assignment is on.

Paint — turn swatches into a brush instead. In Object Mode, press Start Painting and drag across faces to color them one at a time. Ctrl+click picks up the color already on a face, [ and ] step through the palette, and Esc stops.

Which one

Fill is faster whenever you already have a selection, and it is the only option in Edit Mode. Paint wins when you are working face by face and selecting first would just be busywork. Full details.

4. Bake it down ​

Switch to the Merge Materials tab and set Target Collection to the collection holding your blockout. Then choose an output:

  • Texture Atlas — every color packed into one square texture, with a dedicated SwatchUV layer pointing each face at its cell. Set a Save Path and press Generate Swatch Texture.
  • Vertex Colors — the same colors baked into a ProtoColor attribute. No texture, no UVs touched. Press Bake Vertex Colors.

Watch the Swatch Usage readout above the button: it tells you how many colors you have, how many fit, and the resulting cell size in pixels.

Keep cells at 16px or larger

The default Swatch Size of 16×16 px is deliberate. Smaller cells bleed into each other once mipmaps are generated, no matter how tight the UV inset is. The panel warns below 8px.

5. Export ​

Export FBX or glTF with all UV channels included. The report after baking tells you which channel SwatchUV landed on — wire your engine's base-color sampler to that channel, and set the texture to nearest/point filtering.

Engine export covers the UE5 and Unity side properly.

Changed your mind? ​

Restore Original Materials puts the pre-bake assignment back. It reads a snapshot stored as a mesh attribute, so it still works after you have subdivided or cut into the mesh — see Restore.

Next steps ​