What is this “object color” it certainly does not do what I would expect based on it’s name and location in the interface.
The tooltip is “Object color and alpha, used when faces have the ObColor mode enabled” I’ve seen this before in 2.49, but 2.49 has all sorts of items that are not in context displayed in the interface.
My assumption from the usage, would be that this is where you would set the Objects display value - yet this is not the case. The only other reference I can find is an old old posting related to IPO rgb values in the game engine.
Blender has always had this option for a material to be influenced by an object-specific colour. I think the idea is that you can assign the same material to different objects with different object colours, and get the appropriate variation in results. There are options under the material settings to use this colour.
In the attached example all three objects have the same material applied. But the material, in the options section, has been directed to use Object Color. As far as I’ve been able to determine, Object Color replaces the Diffuse Color.
well i use it when i want to fade something that does have the default material and it’s a much convenient way to use alpha more than applying material then checking transparency and putting alpha to zero plus getting the molecularity down to zero like this:
A couple things I learned playing with the trick bat3a is describing:
You have to make sure to enable transparency for the material when using alpha through the object color.
It only works with zTransparency (not raytraced transparency) – it still fades out, but the specular is there.
Using the object color for transparency also doesn’t prevent shadows from being cast (whereas material transparency does, if you enable “receive transparent” for the floor material) – I wonder if this is a bug.
“Fading out” a material doesn’t show up in the viewport, but fading out an object color in the viewport does show up in the viewport if you have GLSL enabled. Nice.
It’s probably on the wiki, somewhere.
In my mind, it would be quicker to do some tests: color your specular and see if objcolor overrides it, etc. From the examples above it’s clear that the object color’s Alpha value is applied to the diffuse as well as the specular, whereas in the material settings it applies to the diffuse only.
With the new renderer coming down the pike pretty soon, I won’t be surprised to see a lot of this changing anyways…
Ah ha, so you can give each object it’s own color! You just have to create a material first and turn on the object color property.
Thanks, I was wondering what the heck I was missing.
Personally, I’d prefer that it didn’t mix the object and material colors, and was just for display. ie. the material would override the object color. But then that’s just more in line with how I see the usage.
