Best Color Picker for Toolbag?

jeffdr

Hi everyone,

So while working on Toolbag lately it occurred to me that our color picker could maybe use some love. Currently we have a similar style to the HSB Photoshop picker: a rectangle picking saturation & brightness, and a separate slider selecting hue.

There are a lot of color pickers out there in the wild - I have my own thoughts about which are best but it seemed like a good idea to try and find out what our users actually prefer. Any suggestions welcome!

Eric Chadwick

I like Unity's color picker a lot. I like picking from the large rectangle, and I use the RGB/HSV switch quite a bit... HSV to adjust color values, RGB to do fine tweaking. The eye dropper is very handy too.




I used to love using CoolPicker in 3ds Max. Especially the Tri layout. The circle is a nice hue selector because there's a lot of surface area in a small space, and the triangle is a nice method for value/saturation mixing. It used to crash Max a bit though, so I stopped using it.
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/shane/coolpicker_color_selector



I haven't used Toolbag in a while, but I hope you make it modeless. Photoshop failed with theirs because it's modal, so you can't leave it open while working.

jeffdr

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

I haven't used Toolbag in a while, but I hope you make it modeless. Photoshop failed with theirs because it's modal, so you can't leave it open while working.

Totally with you on that; photoshop's modal dialog drives me nuts. We'll keep ours non-modal.

BeatKitano

Could help some here, even though it's not really the subject (and I totally agree about what's been said so far)

Renaud Galand

Like mentioned above, being able to quickly access both RGB/HSV would be great.

Couple of other thoughts :

* Being able to enter Color Hex codes. Especially helpful when you try to copy/paste the exact color from a concept, a photo, etc. and you don't want to enter 3 different values (RGB/HSV).

* I'd like to be able to undock the window, position it where I want and have this position saved for future sessions.

* One thing I like about the Maya color picker is that you can access to the last few colors you picked. Really useful while dealing with multiple assets that are supposed to have the same color "theme" applied to them.

* Being able to save custom colors.

* As for the shape of the color picker itself, I personally would go for something squarish

/edit

Quick mockup for fun :

jeffdr

Nice mockup; thank you Renaud. Wasn't sure people cared about hex entry but I guess it's easy enough to add. And the recently used colors thing is a genius idea.

Jeff Parrott

+1 for Renauld's idea. But the color wheel like: http://www.anastasiy.com/colorwheel is really easy. The PS version of this is flash based so it takes a minute to load and is sometimes slow. Really nice addition to Toolbag jeffdr! Can't wait to see what you end up doing.

Renaud Galand

My pleasure, Jeffdr

As for the main color picker shape, having the option to switch between both (classic square design and the color wheel) would be cool!


Can't wait to see what you come up with.

-R

arrangemonk

the mypaint brainstoring site features lot of color picker mockups
http://wiki.mypaint.info/index.php?title=UI/Brainstorm
probably you can find some inspiration there
also i like this kind of hue selection

Macattackk

BeatKitano wrote: »

Could help some here, even though it's not really the subject (and I totally agree about what's been said so far)

im all about this one. the surface areaness of it is amazing and i love that you can easily do complimentary etc color schemes

haikai

I don't really mind the existing color picker, but the suggestions here are good, especially the ability to save colors and having the option of HSV sliders, or at least be able to remember the last used color in case you tweak it by accident.

This actually is something that I think Toolbag could use throughout: Being able to save specific settings more easily and intuitively. Trying to have multiple light and camera and material set ups in the same scene can be really tricky. This comes into play when I'm trying to set the scene up so that I can render out various passes of a model for compositing. If I want to apply the same exact settings to another model it really becomes overwhelming.

I know this is outside the scope of what was asked, but some other things that would be awesome:

• Saving/bookmarking mesh rotation position
• Saving/bookmarking light position
• Saving FOV and Depth of Field settings or at least have it unique to each camera bookmark
• An undo queue would be a lifesaver! I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally moved a slider

Thanks for listening!

jeffdr

Had to leave off on this for a couple of days, but now I'm back on it. Here's what I have so far. I need to rearrange things a bit, add the hex input, and add a palette of saved swatches and then I think it's good to go. I invented a little "similars" box that shows you variations on the selected color, for those of us who have trouble picturing the right color but might know it when we saw it

Renaud Galand

looks cool!

kio

maybe even list the values in the 0-1 range? but only if you have some inputs that way.

ah i think adding the hex value of the color is a must, so tiresome to copy past each value.

Jeff Parrott

Really great so far. Can't wait for that update!

jeffdr

Calling it done for now:


As far as the update goes... this is a bigger project than our modest point updates we've put out in the past. So it might be a while. Which is all I can say about that for now

cptSwing

Oooh..!

(please separate gloss channels, please separate gloss channels)

jeffdr

cptSwing wrote: »

please separate gloss channels