Update Object Colors

CreatiCode

Prerequisite

Description

After adding an object (e.g. a box, an avatar or a model), you can update its color using the following block:

Diffusion Color

The “diffusion color” is also called “reflection color”. It is the color of the lights that an object reflects. When there is no light in the scene, then there will be no diffusion of light, so the object will show up as black. You can set an object’s diffusion color to black if you do not want it to reflect any color. The color you select when you add a box is in fact its diffusion color.

When the light is not white, the object’s color will be a combination of its diffusion color and the color of the light.

Emission Color

The emission color is the color of lights emitted by the object itself, so it is not affected by other light sources. For example, the following 2 boxes have the same diffusion color, but the box on the right is updated to emit purple colors with a black diffusion color. So when we change the lights in the scene, the box on the right is not affected:

When the diffusion color is not black, then the object’s color is a combination of both the diffusion and the emission colors:

Roughness and Brightness

These 2 parameters control the brightness of the object in 2 ways. When an object reflects a light source, there is usually a bright spot on the object. The roughness controls how sharp this bright spot is, and the “brightness” controls how bright is the area surrounding the spot.

For example, when we fix the brightness to a low value like 30, you can clearly observe the effect of different roughness values. A low roughness makes the object look more like metal, and high roughness gives the look of rubber.

On the other hand, when we use larger brightness values, the area surrounding the bright spot becomes brighter. For example, rubber objects generally have a large brightness value, but metal objects usually have a smaller brightness value.

Remove Texture

Sometimes when we try to update the color of a model or an avatar, we may not get exactly the color we specified. This is because that object already carries some texture (a color pattern) or color with it.

For example, when we try to update this sofa’s color, the middle section gives a darker color because of the original color it carries. We can easily fix this problem by removing the existing color as we update an object’s color.

Area Selection

When you update the color of a model or an avatar, you can specify which part of the object would get the new color, using the “area” selection. When you select all areas, the entire object will be updated with that color. But you can also select up to 4 parts of the object: “main”, “second”, “third” and “forth”. Depending on the specific object, the meaning of these 4 areas may be different as well. You will have to try it to find out each area refers to which part of the body.

For example, for this sofa, the 3 sections of it are mapped to the “main”, “second” and “third” areas.

For this police car, the 4 areas are mapped to the car body and windows: