Open Chroma, generate the factory assets, and author your first palette and gradient asset ready to use in your project.
Installation
Chroma is an editor-only package (com.scylla.chroma) built on Scylla Core, and all of its code lives in the ScyllaChroma.Editor assembly.
Requirements:
- Requires Scylla Core 1.2.0 or newer.
If Scylla Core is not in your project yet, start at Core Getting Started and come back here once it is installed.
To open Chroma, choose Tools > Scylla > Utilities > Chroma… from the Unity menu bar, or press Cmd+Shift+K on macOS / Ctrl+Shift+K on Windows and Linux. The window is free-floating and remembers its size and position across Unity sessions.
The first time you open Chroma in a fresh project, the library sidebar is empty. To populate it with Chroma’s bundled palettes and default gradients, open the window’s overflow menu (the three-dot button at the top-right of the window) and choose Create Factory Assets. Chroma generates the factory palette and gradient assets under the color directories configured in Project Settings > Scylla and the library sidebar picks them up immediately.
The factory palettes come in four groups, and every palette carries a tag, so the sidebar’s tag filter isolates any group in one click.
Sixteen hardware palettes reproduce the machines they are named after, from Retro - ANSI and Retro - CGA through Retro - C64, Retro - NES, and Retro - Game Boy. The shared name prefix keeps them together in the sidebar and they all carry the Retro tag.
Three systematic palettes cover the color space rather than any particular machine: Pastels, Hue Ramps, and Spectrum 256, a 256-color palette of 24 hue families in ten tones each plus a 16-step neutral ramp.
Seven semantic palettes name their entries for what they represent, so you can pull a color by meaning instead of picking one by eye:
- Signal – nine categorical colors that stay apart under color blindness and read on both light and dark backgrounds, the set to reach for with debug draw, gizmos, layer colors, and chart series.
- Biomes – 36 terrain colors ordered from deep water up to glacier, so a heightmap can be colored straight from the entry order.
- Materials – ten materials (six metals and four surfaces) as four-step shadow, base, light, and highlight ramps.
- Rarity – six loot tiers, each with a muted variant for locked or unavailable items.
- Skin and Hair – 18 skin tones across six depths and three undertones, plus 14 natural hair colors.
- Values – a 16-step gray ramp with perceptually even steps, for value studies and contrast checks.
- Neon – 16 high-chroma colors tuned for dark backgrounds and bloom.
Ten reference palettes reproduce published scales and data instead of being designed. Elements carries the visible color of all 118 chemical elements in atomic-number order, so the entry index doubles as the atomic number. Skin Color – Monk is the ten-tone Monk Skin Tone Scale at its published values, and Skin Color – Von Luschan is the 36-tile historical scale. Water Color – Forel-Ule (21 steps), Yellowness – Gardner (18 standards), Yellowness – Pt-Co (nine steps), and Yellowness – Pt-Co Low Range (18 finer steps at the bottom of the same scale) are the measurement scales used for natural water, oils and resins, and clear liquids. Eye Color – Martin-Schultz (20 iris categories), Hair Color – Fischer-Saller (25 shades plus a red series), and Hair Color – Level System (10 levels) cover human coloring.
Read each palette’s description before trusting its numbers; precision varies a lot from one palette to the next. Some reproduce published values outright, some are converted from measurements, and some are authored to match a published description because the scale in question is a set of physical glass tiles or hair samples that never had a digital definition. Every palette says which it is.
Setup and Configuration
Where assets land
Chroma reads its output directories from Project Settings > Scylla (not from per-user Preferences; that keeps the paths consistent for every contributor who works on the project). The defaults are:
| Asset type | Default directory |
|---|---|
ColorPaletteAsset | Assets/Scylla/Resources/Color/Palettes/ |
ColorGradientAsset | Assets/Scylla/Resources/Color/Gradients/ |
Factory assets land in those same directories. To change the directories, open Edit > Project Settings… > Scylla and update the color root, palettes subdirectory, or gradients subdirectory. The change applies to assets you create after that point; existing assets stay where they are.
In the Project window, find your palette and gradient assets at the paths above. Double-clicking either asset type opens it directly in Chroma (when the Auto-open on asset double-click preference is enabled, which it is by default).
The library sidebar
The left side of the Chroma window is the library sidebar. It has three sub-tabs: Palettes, Gradients, and Swatches. Each sub-tab lists the matching project assets with thumbnails. Drag an asset from the sidebar onto a tab to load it for editing. The divider between the sidebar and the right pane is resizable and its position is persisted.
Preferences
Per-user Chroma preferences live at Edit > Preferences > Scylla > Chroma. You can set the default named-color database, the transparency checkerboard cell size, and the auto-open behavior. Maintenance actions to clear the color history and favorites are also on that page. For a full breakdown see Preferences.
Usage
Build a palette
Click the Palette tab. Click New in the toolbar to create a fresh ColorPaletteAsset in the configured palettes directory. The new palette is also selected in the library sidebar so you can see the connection between the editor and the asset list.
Pick a color on the Color tab using any of the four 2D pickers (Wheel, HSV Square, RGB Cube, LCh Plane). The chosen color appears in the shared color preview strip as the “New” color. Switch back to the Palette tab and click Add to push that color into the palette as a new swatch. Chroma auto-names the swatch from the nearest entry in the configured named-color database.
Every swatch add, rename, sort, or removal is recorded as a Unity undo step and persisted to the asset file immediately – there is no separate save action.
For full palette authoring detail, see Palette Editor.
Build a gradient
Click the Gradient tab. Click New in the toolbar to create a fresh ColorGradientAsset in the configured gradients directory. The new gradient opens with two stops: black at offset 0.0 and white at offset 1.0.
To add a stop, drag a swatch from the library sidebar, the color history strip, or the color preview onto the gradient bar – the stop lands at the offset under the cursor and takes the swatch’s color. Double-click anywhere on the bar to insert a stop at that point, colored with whatever the gradient already shows there. The alpha rail sits below the color bar and is fully independent of the color rail.
As with palettes, every change is an undo step and saves to disk immediately.
For full gradient authoring detail, see Gradient Editor.
Sample colors from an image
Click the Image tab to open the image sampler. Load any readable texture from the Project window, then extract colors by clicking individual pixels, averaging a region, or running k-means dominant color extraction to automatically distill the image into a palette. You can drag a selection of extracted colors directly onto the gradient bar to seed a gradient from an image.
For full image sampler detail, see Image Sampler.
Using the assets at runtime
ColorPaletteAsset and ColorGradientAsset are standard Scylla Core asset types. Both have custom property drawers, so wherever a field of either type appears in an inspector, it shows an inline swatch strip or gradient bar preview plus an Open in Chroma button. For how to load and use these assets in your own code, see Palette and Gradient assets.