colour picker preset colours - easy to swap?

clivewil2

hello. i have been getting stuck into making up hierarchical material presets for clothing outfits etc. and the 16 allowed swatch slots in the color picker often isn't enough for me to see everything i'm using at once

i imagine these values are stored in a script or user file somewhere, i was hoping i could prepare a few variants and copy the relevant one over before starting DS to give me the custom swatches i want for the job at hand.

would this work? does anyone know which file contains those values?

Catherine3678ab

clivewil2 said:

hello. i have been getting stuck into making up hierarchical material presets for clothing outfits etc. and the 16 allowed swatch slots in the color picker often isn't enough for me to see everything i'm using at once

i imagine these values are stored in a script or user file somewhere, i was hoping i could prepare a few variants and copy the relevant one over before starting DS to give me the custom swatches i want for the job at hand.

would this work? does anyone know which file contains those values?

Consider this product: https://www.daz3d.com/color-picker-for-daz-studio

Picks the color, any color, from the scene. If you have another image that you want to pick a color from, put it on a backdrop ;-)

eta: The Color Picker for Daz Studio is a Windows only plugin.

clivewil2

Catherine3678ab said:

Consider this product: https://www.daz3d.com/color-picker-for-daz-studio

Picks the color, any color, from the scene. If you have another image that you want to pick a color from, put it on a backdrop ;-)

ah yeah, i've had my eye on that for some time but wasn't sure exactly how useful it would be.

if i could change the swatches via a config file of some sort i would prefer to do it that way, i haven't located them yet but i'm getting the impression that those values are probably a small part of a huge file and if i replaced the file outright then i might ruin some other settings in the process.

AND if they're stored in decimal format that would be unfortunate. Lab, RGB and Hex colours are easy to deal with but i'd rather not have to work with e.g. 0.9567320, 0.5836432, 0.2569475 etc. - it makes my eyes bleed.

in the absence of finding a ColorPicker.dsx or similar, i'll grab the picker you mentioned and just have to resign myself to preparing my swatches in photoshop beforehand 

thanks Catherine.

Catherine3678ab

Basically she did all the work for us in making that Color Picker. It was an item that "flew off the shelves" when first released ... at least it did over here, instant purchase. Great way to match the colors of tops to their skirts for example.

I have found that, given the complexity of some Iray shader presets, the colors may still require a little more adjusting to acquire the right look -- but that's Iray. Don't recall any such issues in 3Delight AND I found it to be very accurate in indeed grabbing the correct color values.

We are given the SDK for D/S if you want to try and make plugins or write scripts. [in the store, free] We are not given any rights for taking apart D/S and remaking it in any fashion. If you want those kinds of changes, you put in a request to the company via the CS ticket system, to Tech Support.

Richard Haseltine

Script access is through http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/object_index/colordialog_dz specifically setCustomColor() .

if you hold down shift and click on the colournarea 9as opposed to the values) of a colour widget you will get a cursor you can use to pick a screen colour by clicking.

NorthOf45

That's a new one for me, and a bit tricky. You have to hold the mouse button and the shift key while moving the new "+" cursor. It will pick up any colour in the UI, not just the viewport.

ETA: Okay, you can let go of the Shift key after you click, but don't let go of the mouse button until you get to the colour you want.

Richard Haseltine

If the application is not maximised it can pick up colour from anywhere on screen. You could havea  split screen with DS docked beside a photo and sample colours from the photo.

Catherine3678ab

Cool :-) Thanks Richard :-)

clivewil2

Richard Haseltine said:

if you hold down shift and click on the colournarea 9as opposed to the values) of a colour widget you will get a cursor you can use to pick a screen colour by clicking.

oh wow! now that looks interesting. thanks for that.

if i'm going to have a swatch sheet backdrop in the scene anyway - and it looks like every method mentioned so far requires that in some shape or form - then this is surely the easiest way of picking the colour and applying it directly to the channel i want. i'm definitely going to try this. 

i'll still buy DraagonStorm's color picker at some point, but for now this looks like it might solve my immediate problem.

Richard Haseltine said:

If the application is not maximised it can pick up colour from anywhere on screen. You could havea  split screen with DS docked beside a photo and sample colours from the photo.

 

i wonder if that will work if i have my swatches on a bitmap shown in Irfanview with 'always on top' set. *****

 

***** --> yes it does work, but the colour returned is always consistently brighter than the colour i am sampling, either within the DS viewport, within the DS UI (which gave the best result, but still wrong) or from my floating Irfanview bitmap.

see pic below.

red + shows where i was taking my sample from in the floating bitmap, red * shows the channel which was being updated. as you can see it is much brighter.

and ffff all these bad gateway errors while i'm trying to type.

Richard Haseltine

That may be down to different colour spaces.

Catherine3678ab

Color matches the Materials ID dial.

Catherine3678ab

There are also a number of general use Color Pickers, here is one list of a whole bunch {use all your usual internet cautions for this or any list}

https://listoffreeware.com/list-of-best-free-color-picker-software/

 

clivewil2

Catherine3678ab said:

Color matches the Materials ID dial.

ah, that's an illusion caused by me giving a bad example. here's a better one. you'll just have to take my word for where i indicated that the cursor was, as my screengrabs don't capture it.

interesting to note that some of the colours it picked up *did* seem to be accurate, by appearances they may have been part of the standard 8-colour palette of the windows system (VGA palette? EGA? not the 256 colour palette, the other really basic one) - e.g. any of the pure colours, pure secondaries, plus pure black and white

thanks for those pickers, but the picker itself isn't the problem - i know my way around the DS one and i'm quite ok with typing in RGB or HSV values if i need to.

will DraagonStorm's picker pass its values directly into DS's colour field? or will it merely identify Hex-RGB-HSV which i then have to type into the field manually?

ffffffffffffffff bad gateway, naughty gateway. go and stand in the corner.

Catherine3678ab

Oh I figured something like that may have happened, not to worry.

Yes hopefully by now we all know how to get colours, the lists were also for anybody coming to this thread who may just be looking for a color picker.

But the late DraagonStorm's was made to work inside D/S. At time of release way back when, the "only" mention of minor concern people brought up was to be sure that the initial popup does not cover the area one wants to get the color from.

One has to select at least one surface in the popup - if there is more than one model in the scene, the node tab lets one select which model is to be affected. After selecting the color, one applies and closes the dialog. Upon closing one will see the colour choice appear on the model.

I also use it just to get a certain colour on the palette in D/S. Once there one can of course apply to any of the dials desired - as well as adjusting the shades.

In this image n.b. that figure is not a model, it's an image to grab a color from. The cube is the .obj file.

Richard Haseltine

The Iray Uber base has two differnt types of colour cotnrol - floatColour and plain Colour. Material ID is a regular colour, so that is why it works directly. Most others are floats, with values from 0 to 1, which aer colour corrected.

As ana side, if you cmd(Mac)/ctrl(Win) click the colour control it will open the float colour dialogue instead of the regular colour dialogue. That has a gamma correction checkbox, but it isn't persistent (or at least doesn't chnage the sampler's behaviour that I can see).

Right-click will cancel the colour sampling operation, but the right-click will be passed to whatever is under the cursor at the time which may be unhelpful.

clivewil2

it's a shame the shift-click method doesn't work, that was otherwise exactly what i was looking for - this object, that colour, click, done.

i looked at the video for DraagonStorm's picker, it looks a bit clicky for me - too many clicks to do a single colour.

i bought it anyway, haven't installed it yet though.

Richard Haseltine

clivewil2 said:

it's a shame the shift-click method doesn't work, that was otherwise exactly what i was looking for - this object, that colour, click, done.

i looked at the video for DraagonStorm's picker, it looks a bit clicky for me - too many clicks to do a single colour.

i bought it anyway, haven't installed it yet though.

I am told you should watch the change log http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log

clivewil2

Richard Haseltine said:

I am told you should watch the change log

that sounds promising. bookmarked. thanks Richard. 

Richard Haseltine

clivewil2 said:

Richard Haseltine said:

I am told you should watch the change log

that sounds promising. bookmarked. thanks Richard. 

Check the new Public Build.

clivewil2

•  Fixed an issue with the standard color widget, when configured to display/modify float values, where holding the [Shift] modifier to invoke screen sampling would not linearize the sampled color

  Manifested as the resulting color appearing lighter than the color of the pixel sampled (gamma corrected)

 ...how long is that likely to take before it becomes part of the mainstream release track?

i'm not part of any beta tracks (yet) and i'm not sure how stable Daz's betas are, i've had some very volatile ones in the past with other software and games etc. and i'd rather my DS didn't fall over unnecessarily

(if it's not appropriate for me to post those changelog entries here, please delete them - but they are publicly available aren't they?)

Richard Haseltine

clivewil2 said:

•  Fixed an issue with the standard color widget, when configured to display/modify float values, where holding the [Shift] modifier to invoke screen sampling would not linearize the sampled color

  Manifested as the resulting color appearing lighter than the color of the pixel sampled (gamma corrected)

 ...how long is that likely to take before it becomes part of the mainstream release track?

i'm not part of any beta tracks (yet) and i'm not sure how stable Daz's betas are, i've had some very volatile ones in the past with other software and games etc. and i'd rather my DS didn't fall over unnecessarily

(if it's not appropriate for me to post those changelog entries here, please delete them - but they are publicly available aren't they?)

DS Betas are usually pretty stable.