Best Color Picker for Toolbag?
polycounter lvl 11
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!
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!
Replies
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.
Totally with you on that; photoshop's modal dialog drives me nuts. We'll keep ours non-modal.
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 :
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
http://wiki.mypaint.info/index.php?title=UI/Brainstorm
probably you can find some inspiration there
also i like this kind of hue selection
im all about this one. the surface areaness of it is amazing and i love that you can easily do complimentary etc color schemes
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!ah i think adding the hex value of the color is a must, so tiresome to copy past each value.
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
(please separate gloss channels, please separate gloss channels)