Color, Swatches & Favorites

The color fab in the viewport opens the picker. Save colors you use often to the favorites strip with the "+" button, and it stores whole gradients too, rendered as a gradient bar you can click to restore.

• The entire favorites strip (solid and gradient) persists with the project.
• Click a gradient swatch to restore gradient mode and its endpoints.
• Old projects load fine with zero favorites.

Real Paints

Real Paints matches what you are painting with to paint you can buy. The window has two halves. The top half, Real World Paint to MechaPaint, searches a database of 12,867 bottles, cans and pots from 34 brands, filtered by Brand and Line, and a click on a swatch makes your brush that paint. The bottom half, MechaPaint to Real World Paint, takes your current brush color and lists the closest matches, up to 40 of them, re-ranked live as you move the color wheel, use the eyedropper, or click a favorite. A drag bar between the two halves sets how much room each one gets, and the window remembers where you put it.

The picked row carries the paint you last clicked, with Copy for the name and code, Jar to stand it in the viewport, and Paint List to open the running list of everything this model has been painted with.

Paint jars in the viewport

Press Jar on a picked paint and a little glass jar of it appears in the 3D view beside your model, the way bottles sit on a bench while you work.

• Drag a jar by its silver cap to place it anywhere in the viewport. It stops at the edges and moves with the view when you resize the window.
• Click the paint inside the glass to load your brush with that color. The status bar names the bottle.
• Hover a jar to read its brand, catalog code and hex value.
• Alt+click the glass to put a jar away, the same gesture the favorites strip uses.
• Press Jar on a paint that is already on the bench and its jar pulses to show you where it is.
• Your whole bench saves with the project and comes back exactly where you left it.

The Paint List

The Paint List is the answer to "which bottles do I actually need to buy". The button sits on the Real Paints window with a live count, and the list it opens keeps picked paints and used paints apart.

• Clicking a swatch adds a row at zero strokes. The row counts as used the moment you change the model while that paint is your brush color, so browsing costs you nothing.
• Used rows sort first by stroke count, so the bottle that did the most work is at the top. Used only shows just those rows.
• A stroke, a fill and a bake each count as one, which is the same unit you would count by hand.
• Painting from a jar counts too, so a scheme worked out entirely on the bench still builds a list.
• Copy, CSV and Save sit across the top. Text is grouped by brand, in usage order inside each brand, because you shop one brand at a time. Save writes a .txt or a .csv from whichever extension you type.
• The list lives inside the project file, counts included, so opening a finished model a year later still tells you what painted it.