Import he NCS color system from .ase-file in SU

minatsoneva · 8 Sept 2022, 15:30

Hi, guys, has anyone tried to import the NCS color system (2000 colors) into SU from an .ase-file or used any other way to work with NCS? This file is supposed to work with Adobe software, but I really need it in SketchUp. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

tuna1957 · 8 Sept 2022, 16:48

Curiosity got the better of me…. Looked up .ase (Adobe Swatch Exchange) . My first suggestion would be look in the
3D Warehouse and see if someone might have already created a collection of these colors as .skm files. I know you can find collections of various paint companies whose colors have been converted for SU. It’s worth a look.
If someone hasn’t already done the work for you, you’ll need to search for ways to convert the .ase files to .jpeg files. Then there are SU plugins that will convert the .jpeg’s to .skm files that could be saved as a collection in your materials folders.
All that said I not a guru on this type of thing and I’m sure one of the top bananas will be along with further advice.

Rich O Brien · 8 Sept 2022, 17:48

I know of no way to read in a swatch file and convert to material colour in SketchUp.

But if you can track down the equivalent NCS in .txt format with RGB values then you could use FredoTools to import it.

It would need to be in particular format which you can see here...

..\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2022\SketchUp\Plugins\Fredo6_!LibFredo6\Ancillary

gullfo · 9 Sept 2022, 19:52

there are sources for the NCS colors and there are also online and github converters to get to rgb or hex which as Rich has pointed out could be imported from a text file.
e.g. source https://www.paintcolourchart.com/ncs-colors (which shows corresponding rgb, hex)
e.g. https://github.com/m90/ncs-color

ncs_color_converted.csv

Dave R · 9 Sept 2022, 19:10

@gullfo said:

...and there are also online and github converters to get to rgb or hex...

Did you happen to find anything that would convert all of the colors to RGB or HEX in one go? I could only find converters for single colors.

gullfo · 9 Sept 2022, 19:49

i dumped the color list into a spreadsheet and ran the convert code to create the csv i attached to my original message.

gullfo · 9 Sept 2022, 20:32

i created a color file which can be imported by Fredo's Color Paint tool. colors are sorted in name order. since rgb leads in the file, sorting on rgb would be easy enough in case you want to see in color order vs name order...

ncs_color.txt