cool picker
Since the first incarnation of 3ds max, almost every component of the program
has changed in one or another way. One of the exceptions to this is the color
picker - at times of MAX 1.0, it was top notch, but in the meantime, it has
become quite outdated.
This is especially sad, since picking colors for lights and materials is one of
the most basic operations every modeller has to do over and over again each
day.
However, discreet has enabled us to write our own color pickers by making the
standard picker pluggable. Only, nobody has written such a picker - up until
now.
The "cool picker" started out as a max 3 project, but was soon updated to max
4. I've tested it extensively, and I have to say that it's very addictive.
If you've used it once, you will never want to go back to the small and ugly
standard max color picker.
The cool picker was built with two intentions in mind:
-
Making it fast and responsive. All controls update in realtime, while you are
dragging.
This greatly helps picking colors, since you can see the effect of all other
color components on your current pick at all times.
-
Making it precise and beautiful. The picker is considerably larger than the
tiny standard picker, which gives you greater control of the color picked.
Also, settings like gamma correction influence the picker, so you reall have a
WYSIWYG experience.
Design and functionality also were great considerations during development. I
think this picker looks a lot cooler than the standard one...
Since a picture says more than a thousand words, here's a small demo of the
picker as it looks like:
You can download the cool picker here.
To install, extract the CoolPick.dlu to your max/plugins folder.