How colours are chosen
Colours are derived from the material name, not from its position in a list. Adding, deleting or reordering materials therefore leaves existing colours untouched, and the same name gives the same colour in any file, any time.
Palette mode | How |
|---|---|
Stable (default) | SHA-1 of the name and seed drives hue; saturation and value are drawn from the same digest inside a safe band |
Max Contrast | Golden-ratio hue stepping by index, cycling three saturation and three value levels |
Two guarantees hold in both modes:
- No collisions. Pinned colours are reserved first, generated colours fill in around them, and anything that still lands on a taken colour is nudged in hue, saturation and value until it is unique.
- Nothing is black, and nothing is near-black. Generated colours never go below 60% value, because black is the background and a dark material would be hard to separate from it.
Max Contrast reads better by eye but is index-based, so adding a material shifts the ones after it. Stable never shifts. Use Stable unless you have few enough materials that you care more about telling them apart at a glance.