Colorization workflow for 3D buildings

Making landmarks as flexible as the rest of the map—without breaking materials, performance, or team mental models.

Context

Early models were deliberately monochrome to match Mapbox Standard’s neutral look—clarity and performance first. As other map layers gained full color customization, 3D landmarks needed the same flexibility without losing scalability or consistency.

Problem

Material naming did not hold up at scale:

Names like wall_brick_red applied to non-brick surfaces
System was not ready for upcoming PBR-style logic
Changing one color meant redefining whole materials
One “red” for bricks, bridges, and everything else—teams and visuals diverged

Solution

A color system based on HSV: artists control hue, saturation, and brightness without duplicating or renaming materials. Hue ranges (e.g. 33° ± 5°), dynamic overrides in JSON, logical parts (walls, roofs, glass, statues), and non-destructive integration so existing assets stay valid.

Instead of named colors, targeting model parts and applying hue ranges with optional saturation and brightness constraints gives expressive but controlled variation across entire cityscapes.

Implementation

Assignment in Blender 4.2 against logical parts and real-world references; baking into vertex data for downstream parsing; programmatic adjustments via JSON.