You can use color per vertex sets to switch between, merge, blend, or globally modify the colors stored on your polygonal meshes’ vertices.
For example, you can pre-light your scene by baking your daytime lighting to one color set and then your night time lighting to another color set for each polygonal mesh in your scene. For more information on prelighting, see Prelighting polygons.
You can also touch up your baked lighting results by painting vertex colors directly into your color sets. The Paint Vertex Color Tool lets you remove, replace (darken or lighten), or smooth the lighting baked on your vertices. See Assign colors to polygon vertices by painting.
In addition to storing baked lighting data, you can use color sets to do the following:
You can modify existing baked CPV color sets globally with the Modify feature using either an HSV attribute modifier or an RGBA color channel attribute modifier. The Modify feature creates a polyColorMod node downstream from the CPV color set.
The Modify feature is useful when you need to globally modify an existing color set and don’t want to bake the color and lighting for the object again. The Modify feature is also useful when you want to modify existing color sets to match particular gamma requirements of some computer and interactive games platforms. For more information, see To globally modify an existing color set.
You can render CPV data with mental ray® for Maya® software rendering. See Render color per vertex in mental ray for Maya.
To rename an existing color set
Select Color > Rename Current Color Set.
Select Color > Delete Current Color Set.
Click the Delete button or press the key on your keyboard.
The selected color set is deleted and removed from the editor and the Channel Box.
You can only merge or collapse one color set onto another at a time. Also, merges occur from top to bottom.
The two color sets you selected are merged using the Over blend style option; a blendColorSets node is created for the new color set which replaces the original sets. The new color set is given the same name as the first color set that was selected.
You can only blend two color sets at a time. Also, blends occur from top to bottom.
See Blend.
The two color sets you selected are blended from top-most to bottom-most selection. This blend uses the specified Blend Style. A blendColorSets node is created for the new color set that is created. By default, the blended color set is named blendedColorSet in the Color Set Editor window.
To globally modify an existing color set
A polyColorMod node is created for the selected color set and the Attribute Editor displays with the polyColorMod node tab selected.
The color modifications you make on the polyColorMod node are cumulative. Normally, you should apply color modifications to either the HSV global modifiers or the RGBA color channel modifiers.
The display of Color Per Vertex (CPV) Material Blend Settings varies depending on scene view Shading settings. In textured and shaded mode with Hardware Texturing enabled, Add, Subtract and Multiply blend modes will be displayed with slightly reduced quality. The correct result of all blend modes will be displayed by switching to High Quality Rendering mode (Renderer > High Quality Rendering) with Hardware Texturing (Shading > Hardware Texturing) enabled. If your graphics card does not support High Quality Rendering mode, you can test render using the Hardware Renderer to preview your result. In instances where your graphics card may not support High Quality Rendering or the Hardware Renderer, you can switch to Hardware Shaded mode (press 5 on your keyboard) to preview the blending without textures.