Color by Layer, better color swatch

I love working with the Color by Layer. I do siteplans. I use real texture for rendering purpose but for technical drawing, we always need lighter smooth color, so I use ColorByLayer for this purpose. (You don’t want to see asphalt texture and black shingle roof on an emergency evacuation plan!)

But the color swatch in CbL is really limited. I would like 3 things:

1- a PICKER so we could pick any to match color on the screen.
2- Can edit the color of multiple layer at once.
3- Can choose color from a library. Ideally, the InModel Material library.

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Sorry to jump on your post but:

I would also like 1 extra thing:
4- A keyboard shortcut to toggle between color by layer and my material (currently you can jump out of color by layer by selecting the paint bucket, but then to go back to color by layer, I believe you have to open the layers pallet and select it from there) - I have ended up re-assigning the paint bucket to a more complex combination to avoid selecting it by mistake.

Is it possible to add ‘color by layer’ into the keyboard preferences short cut ?

Try installing this.
It adds the toggle to the View menu, making it shortcut-able…
It should work in all current SketchUp versions and is signed for all loading policies is >=v2016…
TIG-DisplayColorByLayer_v1.0.rbz (2.9 KB)

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Excellent ! Thank you very much :o)

Awesome stuff

I think SketchUp 2018 should try to incorporate a multi mode material palette where color by layer is really just the 2d color set for materials. That way it could keep the same paint bucket tool for hatches and use the materials in SketchUp rather than having to load PNG hatch files for each layer. Plus they aren’t directly editable in SketchUp. That would be a nice feature.

1 Like