The point of my suggestion is to set different styling options by layer (some color by layer and some not), if you’re suggesting something different please clarify. I think you’re requesting the same feature.
And “less relevant” layers in this case wouldn’t be gray they would have various colors or textures in the defined use case.
Your suggestion is more specific and cater for one use case. Sure, you could set a handful of layer to have no color of their own, and display them with the material applied to the entities. But what happens if you want one scene where the main focus (e.g. the building itself) is bright red and everything else to be white (e.g. a site map), and another scene where you want to display an handful of layers by their color and the rest of the model white, and another scene where you want the overall model to be realistically textured but one specific focused layers, maybe the doors, to be highlighted in a specific color, or a view to send to the door manufacturer where the doors are realistically textured but everything else neutral white? If you could set individual layers to use a specific style on a per scene basis, rather than just have one global style applied to the whole model, you could achieve all this in the same model. It would be a very versatile approach that allows for numerous use cases.
I went with the simplest option for implementation but yes that feature request would also be useful. Though, it would be tedious for a user to designate style options for every layer in every scene, especially for layer heirarchy within groups/components.
Revised/Combined Feature Suggestion:
Add an option to the style configuration panels for “Focus Layers Display” a color/texture select from the Materials library. Then in the scenes configuration panel there will be a multi-select layer dropdown to select which layers the Focus Color will be applied to.
One can make a red-focus style, a blue focus style, a white focus style, etc. and fairly easily apply that focus to specific layers on a per scene basis.
I like this solution - it’s simple & leads to minimal changes to the interface. It doesn’t complicate the lives of users who are already effectively using Color By Layer.
Agreed. It seems we’re all in agreement that the Color By Layer feature is nice but could be improved. Hopefully some kind of advancement is made