The content library

The content library is a panel of ready-made 3D objects you can drop onto your drawing to bring a scheme to life.

Placing objects

Open the library panel and browse the categories — houses, trees, cars, street furniture, play equipment, site amenities, and waste & recycling (bin stores and bin collection points, which the bin checks measure). Drag an object onto the canvas, or tap a card and then click to place (handy on touch). Placed objects can be moved, rotated and deleted like anything else.

2D and 3D

Library objects show a plan symbol in 2D and 2D sketch (in black and white), and their full model in 3D — so a scheme reads correctly in every view.

🎨 Colours

Any library object can be recoloured. Select it and press 🎨 Colours on the selection toolbar, or use right-click ▸ 🎨 Colours… (on an iPad, the same row under ⋯). The button is also in the footer of 🏷 Object data, of ⚙ Object parameters and of the 🎛 Stage builder, so it is on whichever screen you called the object's properties from.

The dialog lists one swatch per colour the object draws, the most-used first, with the library colour on the left and a colour picker showing what it is drawn in now. Tap or hover a row and the preview dims everything that swatch does not cover — worth doing before you change anything, because one library colour often builds several parts. On a fairground ride a single red can be the rim, the legs, half the tubs and the canopies, so changing it moves all of them at once.

Some rows are special:

• Plan colour. A tree and a landscaped object draw their 2D symbol from the object's own colour rather than from one of its 3D parts, so that colour gets a row of its own. It is listed first on a tree, because the canopy is what a plan shows.
• Linked trims. Where a form shades a trim from a body colour — a container's wall ribs, a generator's louvre slats, a van's ribs — the trim is listed indented under the body and follows it, so you do not end up with a blue body and ribs that are still a darker shade of the old colour. Untick Linked trims to change them separately.
• A 3D model (anything from the shared library or your own with a model file) lists its materials instead of shapes. A material with a texture is tinted rather than repainted, and the row says so. While the model is still loading the dialog says it is reading the materials; if it cannot be read, its colours cannot be changed until it loads.
• Not drawn by this object any more. A colour you set that the object has stopped drawing — because a parameter changed, or the object itself was changed — is kept and listed here, with a Clear action, rather than being thrown away quietly. Change the parameter back and it comes back with it.

One object, or the whole project

The two buttons at the top choose how far the change reaches:

• These N objects colours only what is selected. It writes nothing to an object that does not draw the colour you changed, so a bench-plus-bin selection in which you change the bench's wood leaves the bin exactly as it was.
• All ‹name› in this project is a project setting: every object of that type, the ones you place later included, and every copy in an array run. It recolours locked objects of that type too — it is a project setting rather than an edit to any one object — and the message line says how many.

Each colour is resolved on its own, this object before the project before the library. So you can set a project colour for every bench and then give one bench its own, and ↺ on that one falls back to the project colour. Where the project sets a colour, a second action, Library colour, keeps the library colour on the selected objects instead — that is how one object opts out. When some objects of a type hold their own colour for a slot, the row offers to clear theirs so the project colour reaches them.

Array runs. A copy in an array is rebuilt from its run on every path edit, so the colour is set on the run — the scope button reads "This run (24 copies)" — and every copy keeps it through a regeneration, a save and a load. Changing the run's object in the array editor clears its colours, because a different object is not the old one's colours.

Apply is one undo step. Reset all clears whichever scope is showing. Tapping beside the dialog does not throw away colours you have staged; Cancel, Escape and ✕ do.

What colours do not change

• Your other projects, and new ones. Colours live on the design, never on the library, so the same bench is library brown in the next project you open and in every new one. The library editor and Add object always show library colours. In a project that sets its own, the palette card shows the project-coloured object with a small dot, so a card matches what dropping it places.
• The 2D sketch view, sketch sheets and the DXF export. Those are black-and-white linework and stay that way, which is what makes a recoloured scheme still issue as a clean drawing. The colour (3D) view, the PDF plan, the 3D model and the AI render all follow the colours. So does the project card on your dashboard — but the card is a snapshot of whichever view was on screen when you saved, so a design saved from the sketch view gets a black-and-white card even though the colours are stored.
• The 3D/Revit export carries the colours as materials. Where some objects of a type hold their own colour, that type is exported more than once, named "… (colour 1)", "… (colour 2)" — so recolour one bench out of twenty and your Revit schedules and view filters show two bench types, not one. A project colour on its own, with no object holding its own, keeps the single type and its plain name.
• Plants with a species, fence, wall and hedge runs, house-type bin stores, and houses. A species sets a plant's own colours, the fence-wall designer owns a run's material and colour, and a bin store belongs to its house type. A bin you place by hand is an ordinary object and is covered.

Adding your own

Use Add object to bring in your own object, including via an advanced JSON definition. Objects can also be published from the Revit plugin. Submissions to the shared library are moderated before they appear for everyone.