###The Problem:
With unions, the only way to control the color is to make it a single color, or to use the desired colors before unioning. To create the following union, I made the base part grey and the cutout NegateOperation black before unioning them together:
If I wanted to change either the base color or the cutout color, I would have to take apart the union, make changes to color, and then union the components back together.
###User Stories:
As a developer, it is currently impossible to control union colors separately during runtime, as scripts cannot do union operations. Even if they could, union operations are not instantaneous and aren’t guaranteed to be successful.
As a developer, it is currently annoying to do this because taking apart and re-unioning the components is time-consuming. Some unions may not be able to be taken apart / re-solved, or require components to be selected in a certain order that takes a long time to rediscover, further complicating the process.
###A Solution:
It would be great to have color groups for unions. Color groups would contain as many entries as colors a union has when created. I could then customize the colors individually, setting them all to something different, or even the same color. It may be useful to be able to set all / multiple colors at once in the event I want two or more colors in a group to be the same.
Relating this to the picture above, when I create that union it would have a color group with two entries: Smokey grey, and Black. If I set the Smokey grey color entry to Bright blue, the union would then look like this:
Since I’m able to configure the colors individually, I’m able to easily set the base color while preserving the color of the cutout, and I don’t have to take apart the union at all. Note that making both color entries the same color wouldn’t combine the entries – I could set both to black, and then set one to another color, and they’d still be configured separately. Color entries in the group are only determined upon union.
###Use Cases:
- Empower user creativity by offering the ability to customize the colors of items instead of using presets
- Dynamically change highlights of characters/etc based on player team color (think AoE)
- Adapt models to multiple tilesets by changing their theme via color in Studio
- Current workaround is to have multiple versions of the same union, with the only difference being colors
- Maps/items that change color based on in-game events (e.g. corrupted room turns white after purification magic)
- Same workaround as above bullet
- The ability to fade highlights/etc into different colors once BrickColor is replaced by Color3
- Not practical to work around; would require too many presets which are all unique unions and would have to each be downloaded
- etc