Skip to content

Palettes & strips

A palette is the heart of Gradient Tools. It is a named grid of colors that the add-on turns into a real Blender image texture plus a ready-to-use material.

Each cell of the grid is a strip. A strip is one of two types:

  • Flat

    A single solid color. The whole cell is that one color.

  • Gradient

    A genuine Blender Color Ramp — any number of stops, every interpolation and hue-path mode. The cell fades across its width.

How a palette becomes a texture

Behind the scenes, every palette generates an image where each strip occupies its own rectangular cell, laid out in a columns × rows grid. When you paint, the add-on simply points your faces' UVs at the right cell:

  • A Flat strip → the face is a uniform color.
  • A Gradient strip → the face fades across the cell, following whatever direction the painting tool sets.

Because the texture and material are generated for you, you never touch the Shader Editor unless you want to.

Slots are permanent

Each strip owns a permanent slot in the grid. That's what keeps your painted UVs pointing at the right color even when you reorder strips, resize the grid or duplicate the palette — every assignment in your scene follows the change automatically.

Managing palettes

In the Gradient Tools panel you have a list of palettes with the usual controls:

Action What it does
＋ Add Create a new, empty palette (it adopts your default size — see Preferences).
－ Remove Delete the active palette and its generated texture.
Duplicate Copy the active palette, including every strip and color ramp.

A new palette starts completely empty — all cells are blank slots, so you begin from a clean sheet and add exactly the colors you want.

Where to go from here