A Blender add-on that makes working with vertex colors easier.

• Preview vertex colors (including alpha!) from object and edit modes
• Various tools, including fill, randomize, gradient, smooth, and color by selection
• Full edit-mode selection support - paint only selected points, edges, or faces
• Supports editing different color attributes
• RGBA color masking, modify only the channels you need
• Palette system with customizable swatches shared across tools
• Addon preferences with startup defaults for every tool

1. Inside Blender go to Edit -> Preferences -> Get Extensions
2. In the search box, type "HUE"
3. Click "Install"
4. Enjoy ✨

After installing the add-on, you can see it on the side panel (press N to open it).

Allows you to choose how vertex colors are presented in the viewport. Make sure it's not disabled before using any of the tools!

• Off, default viewport settings
• RGB, overrides materials' color with vertex colors
• Alpha, same as RGB, but allows you to view the alpha channel as a grayscale color

Contains all the tools the add-on has to offer.

It applies a selected color to the selected object(s) or selected parts of the mesh (points, edges, or faces).

Also includes a palette system - a visual swatch grid where you can store and pick colors. Palettes are shared Blender data, so you can reuse them across tools. You can add, remove, and select swatches from the grid.

Applies a random color to the selected object(s). In edit mode, only the selected parts of the mesh are affected.

Generate Per Element

There are several elements per which random colors will be generated:

• Points — one color per vertex, applied to all its face corners
• Vertices — a unique color for every face corner (maximum variation)
• Faces — one color per polygon
• Islands — one color per connected mesh island
• Face Sets — one color per sculpt face set (requires face sets created in Sculpt Mode)
• Object — one distinct color per selected object

Color Generation Algorithm

Choose from three modes to generate random colors: RGB, Hue, and Palette.

RGB random colors are colors, where each component (red, green, and blue values) are independently generated numbers in a range from zero to one.

Hue random colors are generated by creating an HSV (hue, saturation, value) color representation first, randomizing the hue value, and then converting it back to RGB space. It produces more distinct results, which might be useful for ID maps for example.

Palette random colors assigns randomly selected colors from a palette that you define. It might be useful if you want to use specific colors for the randomization.

Generates a gradient mapped through a color ramp, giving you full control over the final look. The color ramp lets you define any number of color stops, so you can create multi-color gradients, sharp transitions, or subtle blends. In edit mode, the gradient is applied only to selected geometry.

There are ten gradient sources to choose from:

Maps vertex position along a selected axis (X, Y, or Z, forward or reversed). You can choose between local space (rotation affects the direction) or world space (object rotation doesn't affect it).

A radial gradient from a reference point. The origin can be the 3D Cursor, the Object Origin, or the World Origin.

A procedural Perlin noise pattern. You can control the scale, detail (octave count), and seed for different random offsets. Supports local and world space.

Colors based on surface curvature — concave areas (creases, crevices) vs convex areas (ridges, edges). Useful for wear and edge highlighting effects.

Maps the active vertex group weights through the color ramp. Great for visualizing or converting weight paint data to vertex colors.

An enhanced version of Blender's built-in dirty vertex colors. Computes cavity/occlusion per vertex based on how enclosed each vertex is by its neighbors, then maps the result through the color ramp - giving you far more control than Blender's grayscale-only built-in.

Controls include:

• Highlight Angle / Dirt Angle — angle thresholds that define where clean ends and dirty begins
• Blur and Blur Strength — optional smoothing passes to soften the result
• Dirty Only — only affects concave areas, leaving convex areas untouched
• Normalize — stretches results to use the full 0–1 range of the color ramp

Number of edges connected to each vertex.

Average area of adjacent faces per vertex.

Variance of connected edge lengths per vertex.

Regularity of adjacent faces per vertex.

Has three methods of adjusting and post-processing existing colors.

Smooths vertex colors by averaging with neighboring vertices. Useful for softening hard edges between differently colored regions or blending noisy results.

• Iterations — number of smoothing passes (more = smoother)
• Factor — blend strength per pass (0 = no change, 1 = full average)

Respects the color mask, so you can smooth individual channels independently.

Allows you to perform various post-processing operations with your colors, including:

• Levels
• Brightness/Contrast
• Hue/Saturation
• Invert
• Posterize
• Layer Blend

Allows you to mirror vertex colors along an axis.

Only available in Edit Mode.

Colors geometry based on the current edit-mode selection: selected elements get one color, unselected elements get another. Supports vertex, edge, and face selection modes.

Useful for quickly creating selection masks or ID maps directly from your edit-mode selections.

Allows you to transfer vertex colors from other objects. Colors can be sampled in three modes:

• Nearest Vertex
• Nearest Surface
• Raycast

Contains various settings, including color mask settings and color attribute settings.

The add-on has two settings here: an affected channels and a reset vertex colors button.

With the affected channels setting, you can restrict, which RGBA channels are affected by the add-on tools. Every channel is on by default, which means colors are applied as usual. But imagine you left only the red channel on. In this case, only the red channel values will be modified, and values on other channels will not be affected. Why do we need this? Well, you can use different color channels to store different information that will be used later (for instance, in shaders). As an example, your red channel might be a position gradient, your blue channel might be some kind of mask, and so on.

A reset colors button just sets all vertex colors to white (alpha channel to 1). In edit mode, it respects your current selection, so you can reset only the selected parts of your mesh.

In this panel, you can select which color attribute will be affected by the tool. If your object has no color attributes, the plugin will create one automatically for you!

Contains general info about the plugin, such as add-on name and version, original author and current maintainer, as well as a link to this documentation.

You can configure startup defaults for every tool in the addon preferences (Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → HUE). Settings include default colors, modes, angles, and more - all applied automatically when you open a file.

You can also configure a default palette with your preferred colors, which is automatically assigned to the Fill and Randomize palette pickers.

A Keyboard Shortcuts reference section lists all operators with their bl_idname values, making it easy to assign custom shortcuts through Blender's keymap editor.

Since Blender doesn't have a built-in feature to display the alpha channel of vertex colors, I had to use a special material for that. When you enable alpha display mode, this material temporarily overrides all active object materials. If you have different materials assigned to various parts of your geometry, the alpha display mode will reassign them, so be careful with that.

Also, if you change an active object or color attribute, the material will not update automatically, and you have to manually re-enable alpha display mode to see the updates.

Color attributes might have two domains: vertex and face corner. The vertex domain stores colors per point (for instance, a cube has 8 points), while the face corner domain stores colors per vertex (a cube has 24 vertices, 3 per point). It sounds confusing, but the thing is, a face corner domain gives you much more control over vertex colors, so I recommend using only it.

Still, the plugin supports vertex domain, but some tools will be limited, for instance, you will lose the ability to choose the element, and random colors will be applied.

At the moment, the documentation is not user-friendly. I plan to move it from a markdown file to a more comfortable place (like GitBook?), plus add some screenshots and video examples, since some tools are much easier to describe visually.

Licensed under GNU General Public License, Version 3.0, LICENSE or https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

• Created by Kai Fardreamer

• Major contributions by Clonephaze, thank you!

• Some ideas are inspired by Ethan Simon-Law`s Vertex Color Plus addon, check it out as well!