Try using the tools when a part/parts are selected. They should work then. There’s some not-so-obvious way to change that default behavior into modifying the parts on click called “Color Action as Tool” and “Material Action as Tool”, but I forgot where they are on the ribbon since I essentially nuked it in my custom ribbon.xml. IIRC, they’re in some tiny submenu located near the material/color tools.
But even if it is, right now if I select a model and press the color button it turns the whole thing the same color, except for the Unions which are still broken.
This seems like a very annoying way to paint a model made of many parts, so I doubt it is working as designed.
Just installed vanilla studio to test. This is where you change the tool behavior:
The selection-based coloring instead of clicking is intentional behavior. When RibbonBar was first released, we got some spiel that this was the new and trendy way to color parts, but after enough complaining the “Action as Tool” options were added. < Official update thread >
Unions work. You just need to set union.UsePartColor to true. Unfortunately this isn’t enabled by default in unions whose components are all the same color, so it’s a little confusing, but there’s a Trello card up to change that though.
Annoying how? That you have to select the parts to color them? In that case, you have the Action as Tool things (which unfortunately aren’t enabled by default). Or is it annoying because you can’t color individual parts without looking through the explorer? In that case, you can alt+click on a part to select it instead of the model (which also is unfortunately not made very clear).
So, in summary, the Color tool has so many weird edge cases that someone who spent 10 years using Studio has no idea how they work now.
Furthermore, they give no feedback when nothing is selected so Studio doesn’t teach me the new way of doing it.
Furthermore, the new way of doing it seems ill-conceived unless there are use cases I have not considered. The basic use case of inserting a car (which is a model) and changing its colors part by part now requires twice as many clicks as before. The uncommon use case of changing every part in a model to be a single color has now been made fast. Unless the model contains Unions in which case I can go pound sand.
Yeah using it as a tool should be the default. There’s already a way to change properties of multiple objects at once (just by having them all selected)
Yep. The color/material tools need a lot of work. Would also be nice if people who regularly use the tools successive times in a row are involved in the QA process this time around.
When unioning differently colored parts, the union retains the original colors of its individual parts. that’s why this is still grey, even though I tried to make it green:
