Apply colors to operations

[deannagelosi]

In the Praxis workshop, some participants wanted to apply color directly to an operation rather than using the seed draft method. This does seem like an intuitive way to add color since the colors and systems are available in the Editor, so it's confusing when they can apply color to the operation in the Editor but the color is not applied when they return to the mixer.

Screen.Recording.2026-06-29.at.11.04.57.AM.mov

[Devendork]

So this is a tricky one. When you clicked "enable edits" in the editor, it made a copy of the draft, and you added colors to that copy, not to the one generated by the twill operation. It does this because the twill operation can only know twill operation things, and it doesn't have any knowledge of color. If you add color manually, it's unclear if rerunning the twill should keep those colors, or overwrite them.

One thing we could think about doing is automatically adding the components necessary to apply colors. So if you hit "enable edits" and it detects that you only changed colors or systems, it could automatically connect the output of the twill, and the palette you created, with add materials operation.

The color stuff is counter intuitive, but I worry that if I make it intuitive, it will violate some of the underlying logic of the workflow (e.g. anything that is modifying a draft is visible and editable).

Thoughts?