Palettes

Landmark colours are generated, not picked one at a time. Five generators, previewed live, and a spread mode that hands a whole palette out in one press.

The row of chips under the sliders is exactly what pressing Create will make. It updates as you drag.

The generators

Mode decides how the colours are chosen. The controls change with it — a page that showed every control of every mode at once would make you work out which three of the eight matter, and the answer changes with the mode.

Mode	Chooses	Reach for it when
Hue Wheel	N hues spaced evenly around the wheel.	You know how many landmarks you want and want them maximally even.
Distinct	Hues stepped by the golden ratio.	You do not know the final count.
Ramp	An interpolation between two colours you pick.	The regions are a sequence — vertebrae, finger joints, LOD bands.
Harmony	A scheme built around one base colour.	The pass has to sit next to something, or go in a presentation.
Random	Random, but rejected until far enough apart.	You just need N colours and do not care which.

Hue Wheel

Even spacing: with a count of 6 you get red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta. Hue offset rotates the whole set, which is how you keep two neighbouring assets from coming out the same colours.

Distinct

Successive hues are stepped by the golden-ratio conjugate, which lands each new colour as far as possible from every hue already used. The useful property is that the first N of the sequence are well spread for every N:

Distinct(5)  = the first five of Distinct(8)

So adding a ninth landmark to a set of eight does not force you to recolour the first eight. Saturation and value are nudged on every second and third entry as well, because pure hue rotation starts to repeat visually past about a dozen swatches on a mid-grey viewport.

Why this is the default for shells

Landmarks from shells does not know how many pieces a mesh has until it looks, so it needs a generator whose answer for 7 is not thrown away when the answer turns out to be 23.

Ramp

Interpolates between Start and End. Blend in decides how:

Space	Red → blue travels through	Use for
HSV	magenta — saturation is preserved	Anything where the middle should stay colourful
RGB	grey — the literal channel blend	Matching another tool that blends this way
Linear RGB	grey, but weighted the way light adds up	Matching what a renderer would do

Twenty-four steps, HSV: the middle stays saturated instead of washing out.

A greyscale endpoint has no hue of its own, so it borrows the other end's — otherwise white → red would sweep the entire wheel on its way.

Harmony

Builds a scheme around Start. The base colour is always first, so switching scheme keeps the palette recognisable.

Scheme	Anchors
Complementary	The base and its opposite
Analogous	Neighbours, 30° apart, closest first
Triadic	Three, 120° apart
Split Complementary	The base and the two hues either side of its opposite
Tetradic	Four, 90° apart
Monochromatic	One hue, a ladder of saturation and value

Past the anchors the generator walks value and saturation down, so a nine-swatch triad is nine colours rather than the same three repeated three times.

Random

Random hues with jittered saturation and value — but each candidate is rejected and re-rolled until it clears a minimum perceptual distance from every colour already chosen. Naive randomness hands out two oranges in a row surprisingly often, which for a landmark set is worse than useless.

Seed makes it repeatable: the same seed always produces the same palette, so you can regenerate the identical set tomorrow. The dice button rolls a new one.

The preview

The chips under the sliders are the actual colours the generator will produce. Hover one for its number and hex; click it to put that hex in the status bar.

Naming

Field	Effect
Prefix	Shaders are named prefix_01, prefix_02, … Illegal characters are replaced, so head mark! becomes head_mark.
Group	Written onto every landmark created, and what the list's group filter uses. Optional.
Shader	The node type to create. See Shaders.

Re-running Create with the same prefix updates the landmarks it made last time rather than creating a second set beside them.

Why re-generation reuses names

Creating a fresh set every time would leave landmark_01, landmark_011, landmark_012 behind it — one orphaned shader per experiment, all of them still in the scene, none of them assigned to anything. Tuning a palette is exactly the thing you do fifteen times in a row, so it must not litter.

Creating and assigning

Button	Does
Create	Makes the shaders. Assigns nothing.
Create + Assign	Makes them and hands them out over the current selection, using Spread.
Preview Spheres	Makes them and builds a row of spheres wearing them, under one group, so you can judge the palette on real geometry.

Spread

Mode	Hands out
Per Object	One landmark per selected mesh, in order.
Per Shell	One landmark per connected piece of each mesh — the fast way to colour an asset that is already split into parts.
All	Every target gets the first landmark. A plain assign.

Both Per Object and Per Shell cycle the palette if there are more targets than colours.

Preview spheres are disposable

They are rebuilt from scratch under AM_landmark_preview_grp every time, so they never accumulate, and Utilities → Delete Previews removes the group entirely. They are ordinary polygon spheres — do not leave them in a published scene.

Recolouring what already exists

You do not have to get the palette right before you start. The palette button in the list's row of actions re-runs whatever the Create page is currently set to across the landmarks you have already made, keeping their names, groups and assignments.