The Color Picker

Using the Color Picker

You can use the Color Picker either by clicking on the Color Picker tab, or by clicking on a Color Picker button in the Parameter View. When the button is pressed down, values selected in the Color Picker will be fed into the three parameters for the node automatically.

 

In the color wheel, you can drag the cursor around to select a point. Dragging across the bottom greyscale bar will change the overall value of the both the wheel and the picked color.

To animate the color values, open the parameter sub-tree and turn on the autokey toggles for each parameter you wish to animate.

You can get a numerical readout of your information in all color spaces by opening up the Values subtree. You can also arrange your information into different ranges, i.e, 0 to 255, 0 to 1024, etc. You cannot alter your information in the Values subtree.


If you open the other subtrees, RGB, HSV, CMY, or HLS, you can adjust the values. For example, if you use the virtual slider to boost the value slider past one, all three parameters in the linked node will be increased the same amount.


If the Sample From Viewer switch is on, you can drag the cursor across a Viewer, and color will be picked up. Sometimes you may be doing a color correction, i.e., the Color Picker is linked to a Mult node. If this is the case, the realtime update of the color correction will interfere with on-screen selection of color, causing a feedback loop. Switch on Use Source Buffer, and the values will be taken from the parent node, not the current node.


The buttons on the top of the Color Picker control what values are returned when you scrub, either the current pixel's value, the average value of the pixels you scrub, the minimum value, or the maximum value of the pixels scrubbed.

 

The Color Picker also has a Palette associated with it. To select a color, click on a palette button. You can also Drag and Drop to and from any palette button to or from any other Color Picker color swatch.

To assign a color to a Palette swatch, drag from a color swatch onto the Palette swatch. These assignments will be saved if you use the File - Save Interface Settings function.



Customizing the Interface for use with Palette and Color Picker

These commands go in your ui .h file, as described under Customize Shake.

Code
Notes
nuiSetColor(1,1,0,0); 
nuiSetColor(2,1,0.5,0); 
nuiSetColor(3,1,1,0);

These lines assign a color to a palette swatch, with the first number being the box it is assigned to. Values are in a range of 0 to 1.

 

nuiPushControlGroup("Color");
    nuiGroupControl("MyFunction.red");
    nuiGroupControl("MyFunction.green");
    nuiGroupControl("MyFunction.blue");
nuiPopControlGroup();
nuiPushControlWidget(
  "Color",
  nuiConnectColorPCtrl(
    kCMYToggle,
    kMaxColor,
    1
    )
  );
);
Use this to assign a color picker to your custom macros. This code will create a subtree named "Color" containing the three parameters red, green, and blue, although these can be any three parameters. The last function (nuiConnectColorPCtrl) selects what color space the values are returned in, what type of value, and if you want to use the source buffer or not.