First things first, I’m aware of the various marbling colourpacks, but that’s not what I’m looking to do.
I’ve noticed that some parts in stud.io, both Custom and Master, come with a precoloured section, such as the Hordika tools or Hero Factory 1.0 weapons:
These colours remain even in the PartDesigner tool:
My first guess was that the coloured section was perhaps just a large decal, but stud.io won’t put decals on curved or overly-detailed parts.
How can I save a file with colour such that it will still have colour when I import it into stud.io? Is there a special file type than I am unaware of? I have currently figured out how to save my coloured part as a GLB file, but I can’t figure out how to convert it into a format that stud.io will accept while still maintaining the colour.
Good shout Senit.
Yeah though, the best way is to seperate the part into multiple parts in a 3d modeling program like blender then turn them into connecting parts in parts designer.
The important parts were splitting the part into two objects, and saving them as LDraw parts from stud.io itself, rather than as .obj files in the Part Designer.
Here’s my simplified procedure, for anyone else who has the same question:
Save your part as a 3d object
Split the part into multiple objects as you would like the colours to be split. This can be done in Blender, though I used Solidworks
Whatever part(s) you want to be coloured, import them into stud.io as normal, with PartDesigner
Open the custom part in stud.io and colour it as desired
Export the coloured part from stud.io as an LDraw part. The custom stud.io part can now be deleted, if desired.
In PartDesigner, import the coloured LDraw part, as well as the uncoloured “base”
Arrange the parts so that they line up, and export it all as a new custom part
With this procedure, the uncoloured “base” can still be coloured in stud.io, while whichever parts went through the LDraw procedure will remain their assigned colour.
