Color Palettes

[johnharley]

I have two questions regarding color palettes. First, is there an easy way to import an entire color palette which might be generated in another program such as Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW? I have manipulated individual colors with the editing feature, however, it is very tedious to generate an entire palette this way. I have tried importing the color swatches as an enhanced metafile. The swatches will come into Vectorworks as vector objects but the program seems to automatically change the colors to the closest matching colors in the default Vectorworks color palette. Bring the metafile in "as a picture" retains the color accuracy, but then are not editable.

Second question. I have downloaded two Vectorworks color palettes off the Internet and imported them into a drawing. Is it possible to easily switch back and forth using multiple palettes in a single drawing session?

VW 12.5 Win XP, 3.4 Ghz, Nvidia Quattro 3500 256 mb vid card, 4 GB RAM

[Petri]

First,

I don't think so. You need to create gradients (2D work) or textures (3D work) for full 24-bit colour.

Second

You can switch, but all colours are interpreted to the current palette.

[Guest]

You can only use one palette at a time. If you want to pull colors from a few different color palettes, the best thing to do is to create a palette with the selected colors.

You cannot pull other color palettes at this time. Right now, RGB is the only color set available.

[johnharley]

I am in the process of doing just that. I have been creating a new color palette but I have hit a snag. The top three rows and part of row four seems to be "locked" If you look carefully there is a black line around these colors on the palette editing dialog. It won't let me change they (or even pick them). I know there must be a way to unlock these, I have downloaded two palettes from the net and these rows were changed. Any idea on how to accomplish this?

[Petri]

Uncheck "Lock Reserved Colors"

[johnharley]

Where is this option located? I should add, I am using the windows version.

Edited December 15, 2006 by johnharley

[Petri]

Should be "right there" in the Edit Color Palette -dialog, under the swatch.

[johnharley]

It is not located in the Edit Dialog. I did some searching through the VW help files, if I understand this correctly, this option (to unlock reserved colors) is only available on the MAC version. I'm not sure why, maybe someone from Nemetschek could verify this. If this is the case is it possible for me to email this file to a MAC user out there so the color pallette could be unlocked saved and sent back to me? I have over three hours work into this one. My only alternative is to start over on one of the palettes I download from the net. ugh!

[Petri]

John,

We could try - but it may be that under Windows it still won't work. Check your private messages.