Color matching fills on a mac

[Anonymous]

With the new colored elevations/sections, I was trying to use a cover fill for printing and found it was hard to exactly match the color AC was assigning to my object. Another employee, thanks Chad, showed me a great way of fixing my problem. If you go to your iFinder and go to Applications, the folder housing utilities contains a small color program called DigitalColor Meter. With this you can scroll over any color on your screen and retrieve the RGB 8, 16 bit in actual or hex format. This helped me make a few new colors but should help many when using the colored elevations/sections.

[TomWaltz]

Can't you just check the RGB colors of the materal then match that?

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your reply,
I checked out what you were referring to but I'm thinking that might only work if you are not using any shading. If you are however using shading, it changes the surface color of you material I believe. The Mac color matcher tells you pixel by pixel what each color is. Hope this better explains it but if I am still wrong, please let me know.

[Link]

I think Demetious is referring to the new RGB pen -2, which is shown by the 3-color circle icon. ArchiCAD 10 now supports true color usage. If you create elevations using shadows, gradient fills, etc. the copied fill will have a color palette color from the sytem color palette (not ArchiCAD, which contains only 256 colors). This icon indicates that the fill has a color out of the AC color palette.

There's no way to find out what the RGB values are, using ArchiCAD alone unfortunately. Of course mac makes it really easy!

Cheers,
Link.

[Aussie John]

The easy way to match a colour is to select the magnifying icon once you are in the default colour edit and click on the colour of your choice. (Mac only). No need to go to the utility.

[Anonymous]

Link,
Although I wasn't talking about that new color, I am now curious how that works. I do not see it on my color palette anywhere. How did you get that 3-color wheel to show up?

I was instead talking about if you use a basic color/material and then open an elevation with shadows on, AC changes the original surface color to adjust for lighting. The only way I know how to match that undefined color is to use the mac colormatch utility.

Aussie,
I'm not sure what you are referring to, maybe the spotlight tool on a Mac to find the colormatch program easier? I don't know of any magnifying glass in AC10. Please explain further.

[__archiben]

Demetious wrote:
I was instead talking about if you use a basic color/material and then open an elevation with shadows on, AC changes the original surface color to adjust for lighting.

that's the crux of the RGB '-2' pen. it's an archicad-only pen for use in exactly the circumstances you describe . . . once you have your elevations generated, Select All... then Copy and Paste it back to another area of the elevation window (or convert the sect/elev window to a drawing if you want to). now take a look at the exploded fills archicad has generated . . . because it's possible for the the adjusted colour not to match anything in the penset, archicad matches the fill background colour to an RGB value. unfortunately we can't (yet) edit it or change those RGB values ourselves manually.

I'm not sure what you are referring to, maybe the spotlight tool on a Mac to find the colormatch program easier? I don't know of any magnifying glass in AC10. Please explain further.

when you bring up the colour picker palette - click the magnifying glass icon and you can match to the colour of any pixel currently on screen . . . see attached image.

~/archiben