Kaleidoscope is an add-on developed for Cycles in Blender. The add-on adds two new Nodes to Materials, "Spectrum" and "Intensity", which essentially improves your work-flow inside Blender when creating Materials for your objects
The reason I created this add-on was to provide the most essential tasks needed while creating scenes in Blender. As an artist myself, I do get stuck in Colors, Lighting, and even more! And this small package of nodes will improve and fix all that. I do understand that Blender nodes can be scary sometimes, but these nodes are well designed so that anyone can use them :)
While there are 2 Nodes in the Kaleidoscope add-on, both are powerful, and can is customizable to give results based on your liking. The Nodes that come with the add-on are: Spectrum is a Node which allows you to generate visually appealing color schemes and palettes. It comes with the Spectrum Engine, which can generate infinite color shades and palettes. But to make it even more powerful, it comes with Color rules such as Monochromatic, Analogous, Triadic, and even more. You can select the Color Rule you are looking for, and let Spectrum generate the Color palette based on that rule.It also comes with Global Color Controls, to manipulate the Hue, Saturation and Value of the Palette. Since the Spectrum Node is global in a Blender scene. You can generate a new palette, and see the live changes directly. No need to update any link or material.
I have also created an online library of popular palettes. You can use them directly within the Spectrum Node
There's even more in the Spectrum Node, but I will leave that to you to check it out ;)
Intensity Node is mainly designed to store predefined values for certain values of nodes in Blender. For example, the Glass IOR value, which defines the refractive index of the material, is important to be physically correct to product accurate results. The Intensity Node is the collection of all those values. You can browse through values such as Water, Diamond, and even more.The two Categories which are available in the Intensity node are Glass IOR, and Blackbody. I do plan in adding more in the future :)
I have designed Kaleidoscope add-on in such a way, that it can also run on any other Blender add-on also. Since the Spectrum Node modifies an object's material, the spectrum.py file can be imported into other add-ons and used more productively. I did create a Grease Pencil Palette generator with the spectrum.py file in minutes.I would be glad to see other people use the Kaleidoscope add-on in their projects, and in other add-ons too. This add-on would be constantly updated with more features and improvements :)
These tools have inspired and helped me in making this add-on for Blender: Files and Community Database is hosted on: