8

Color Cl ipboard Utility 159
of the color controlled by that slider is used. If the
slider is all the way to the right, the field reads 255.
The m aximum amount of that color is b eing used.
The spinners to the right of each slider are another
way of setting the red, blue, or green component.
The colors in the sliders change to show an
approximation of what the color result will be
if you move the slider to that location, without
adjusting any other color parameter.
Hue—Setsthepurecolor.Locatingthesliderall
thewaytotheleftgivesyoupurered. Asyou
drag the slider to the right you move through
the spectrum of Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue,
Magenta, and back to Red again. Hue is more
accurately represen ted as a color wheel rather than
a linear slider. That is why the Hue slider is red at
both ends. Think of the hue range from 0 to 255 as
being points on a circle where the numbers 0 and
255 are right next to each other.
Saturation ("Sat")—Sets the purity or strength of
thecolor.Aweakcolor,withasaturationnear0,
is dull and gray. A strong color , with a saturation
near 255 is very bright and pure.
Value—Sets the lightness or dark ness of a color.
Low values darken the color toward black. High
values lighten the color toward white. A value in
the middle, at a setti ng of 127, gives you the color
definedonlybyhueandsaturation.
Co lor Out put—This pair of color swatches, below
theValueslider,letsyoucomparethenewcolor,
shownontheright,totheoriginalcolor,shown
on the left.
Reset—Click to restore color sett ings to the
original color.
Color Se lector for mental ray M ater ials and
Shaders
When you click a color swatch in the interface for a
mental ray material (page 2–1384) or mental ray
shader (page 2–1520)
, you see a variation of the
Color S elector.
This dialog differs from the standard Color
Selector in two ways:
• TheRGBandHSVvaluesappearasnormalized
values between 0.0 and 1.0, rather than as 8-bit
integers (0–255).
• An additional Alpha slider and spinner let you
explicitly set the alpha value for this color. This
value is also n ormalized, where 0.0 represents
fully transparent, and 1. 0 represents fully
opaque.
This version of the Color Selector also appears
when you use the
DirectX 9 Shader material (page
2–1422)
and the mental ray renderer’s Sampling
Quality rollout (page 3–97)
.
Color Clipboard Utility
Tools menu > Color Clipboard
Utilities panel > Utilities rollout > More button > Utilities
dialog > Color Clipboard button
The Color Clipboard utility stores color swatches
for copying from one map or material to another.
Forexample,ifintheMaterialEditor,youwant
tocopyacolorfromaswatchinonelevelofa
material to a swatch in another level (or from
another material), there would be no way to do
it with drag and drop. This is because you c an’t
have two materials/maps visible at the same time.