Vertex Colour Controls

[WARNING VCC 1.2 is the final version to support Blender 2.9. - 3.2, VCC 1.3+ require Blender 3.4+]

The VCC add-on was designed primarily to allow easier access to more precise vertex colour controls and be able to work on multiple meshes at once, though it has grown since that initial idea and will continue to grow in the future.

Current features include:

• Assign vertex colour values to single or multiple meshes at once.

  

• Control which channels (RGBA) to apply values to.
• Work with 0-1 strength values or full RGBA colours.
• Copy channel strength and colour values from vertices to be re-used.
• Includes a custom shader that allows the user to view individual colour channels (RGBA) in isolation or the RGB elements in the usual way, this shader is controlled directly through the VCC Panel.

  

• Save strength values and colour values to a list of presets, this list is independant from Blend files and can be accessed from any project.

  

• Bake colour gradients to selected vertex or faces in linear, spherical or normal direction forms.

  

  

• Copy vertex colour data from one channel to another (e.g. red to blue) or as shown here Swap vertex colour data between two channels (e.g. red to blue and blue to red).

  

Will VCC be useful to you?

• Do you ever need to apply vertex color values to more than one mesh at once?
• Do you use any vertex colour driven shaders?
• Do you want to see each vertex colour channel in isolation in greyscale form?
• Do you ever find you need to alter vertex color values but you don't want to affect specific channels you've already finished?
• Do you ever forget the precise values you used on another part of your mesh or even another mesh entirely?
• Would you find it useful to be able to store lists of values or full RGBA colours that persist across all of your blender projects?
• Could you benefit from remaining in the same workspace whether you're editing your mesh or applying vertex colour values?
• Do you have a use for gradients that can be baked into your preference of vertex colour channels?
• Did you previously use Maya or another application with similar vertex colour functionality?
• Have you ever experienced a lasagne sandwich? They're pretty good.

If you can identify with any of the first nine points above then you may well find VCC useful.

Thank you for taking the time to check out this addon, if you decide to purchase it I hope you find it as useful as I do!

If you have any questions, feedback or feature requests please come to the discord server linked below.

Documentation:https://squeyed-addons.github.io/VCC-Docs/

Tutorial Video:https://youtu.be/phtRteKYcNg

Discord Server:https://discord.gg/Y8HKYBb5rN

Update v1.4.4 - 05 December 2024

Fixes:

A change to icon IDs in Blender 4.3 meant many of the Blender icons that VCC used needed updated indexes, but rather than having to potentially deal with this issue again in the future I've created custom icons for everything in VCC.

Fixed an error caused by attempting VCC operations while the user's object selection included other object types than meshes. Now all non-meshes are removed from the selection when an operation is run.

Altered the default VCC Channel Viewer gradient so the the alpha channel now goes from 0 to 1.

Re-wrote the Select functions (that removes all verts currently selected that do not match the Simple Strength/Advanced Strength/Colour value within the Tolerance value) as it was a bit of a mess and did not correctly take into account gamma conversion.

Fixed some Preset functionality, mainly with the retrieval of preset values, but also a bug in the paging system.

Lots of other minor fixes, too many to recall and a lot of work put into the gradual rewrite process that I mentioned in the VCC discord channel.

Changes:

It was brought to my attention how the layout of the Layers and View dropdowns were behaving very annoyingly, it was as a result of a gap large enough for the mouse cursor to interact outside of it's panel, causing finicky panel confusion. To avoid this I've laid the Layers, View and Transfer dropdowns in a horizontal row together, they should now be less irritating to use.

Update v1.4.3 - 27 June 2024

Fixes:

Fixed subtract feature for blue and alpha channels in Simple Strength mode.

Fixed Channel Viewer absence error. [If the Channel Viewer material is deleted after import and an attempt is made to change the channel viewer settings through VCC's panel an error would occur, instead it will now check for the Channel Viewer material and re-import it if missing.]

Update v1.4.2 - 07 May 2024

Fixes:

Fixed inaccurate colour reproduction in Gradient Mode.

Fixed inaccurate colour values in Swap and Transfer features.

Fixed edge selections being recognised incorrectly as a face selection.

Update v1.4 - 05 Feb 2024

Additions:

Simple and Advanced modes now have 2 new ways to apply vertex colours, they are Add and Sub(tract). This allows you to add or subtract the current strength values to/from the values on your currently selected vertices or faces.

There is an extra file in the downloads section called Shader Helper, this allows you to re-use the shader nodes from the VCC Channel Viewer shader in any shader Blender material. This works by searching through the materials in your scene for node from the VCC Channel Viewer, so to use this extra mini-addon I recommend that you do not alter the nodes yourself, simply copy and paste them into your material and connect their outputs as you require. This was created as a VCC user wanted to avoid swapping out materials constantly but wished to maintain the ability to view individual vertex colour channels.

Fixes:

Fixed gamma correction for the alpha channel in the Simple mode Set Strength function.

Update v1.3.4 - 26 May 2023

Fixes:

Fixed gamma correction on Copy function for Colour and the alpha channel in Simple Strength mode.

Update v1.3.3 - 16 May 2023

Fixes:

Fixed innacurate values due to lack of gamma correction.
Tweaked menu presentation in the View section.
Prevented an error occuring when trying to import the Channel Viewer material.

Update v1.3.2 - 09 May 2023

Additions:
Presets are now supported for the new Advanced Strength mode.
A new feature has been added that allows you to select verts that match your current value, this works in all modes (Strength, Advanced Strength and Colour). There is a "tolerance" value that affects how close the match has to be. As with all of VCC's main features this can be used on multiple meshes all at once. To use this feature select a portion or all of the verts on a mesh, set your value and tolerance then click the button with the cursor image, the function will now unselect all of the verts that don't match your current value leaving only those that match.

Fixes:
Fixed a bug where object mode would be entered in error.

Update v1.3.1 [Preview] - 17 April 2023

This is the complete rebuild of VCC to work with Blender 3.4 onwards, as such I'll be adjusting the supported versions of Blender going forwards to be 3.4+ for now, however the old version will still be available to those not wishing use a newer version of Blender.

Additions:
There is now an Advanced Strength mode. The normal Strength mode is now called Simple and works as it always did. However the Advanced Strength mode works similarly to Colour mode except you can set each channel value numerically as you can in Simple Strength mode. Advanced Presets are not yet supported but that's coming soon.

Update v1.2.0 - 14 January 2022

Improvements:

Relocated the "Layers" dropdown menu to the bottom of the VCC panel, alongside the new "Transfer" dropdown. As more features are added there may be future re-shuffling of the VCC interface, please feel free to drop by the VCC Discord channel if you have any preferences/suggestions regarding that going forward.

Additions:

New feature called Swap allows the user to perform a two way swap of the vertex colour values from one channel with the values of another channel, for example red to blue and in return blue to red.

The user can also do a one way transfer which leaves the source vertex colour values intact, this is called a Copy.

Update v1.1.0 - 06 January 2022

Fixes:

Applied a change to avoid a warning message in Blender's console.

Improved logic to prevent some layer handling issues.

Fixed a bug where a non-mesh object in a selection could prevent the colouring process completing.

Improvements:

Decreased time it takes to apply vertex colours by approximately 8%.

Additions:

New feature that allows the user to delete vertex colour layers on single or multiple meshes en masse.

Layers can be deleted by the user providing a specific name or simply deleting all layers at once.