Colour fields
A formula that returns a colour at every point in space, so surfaces can be painted and textured without unwrapping UVs.
What it is
A colour field is a field that answers one question: what colour is here? Hand it any point in space and it returns an RGBA colour, red, green, blue and opacity.
Because it is a formula rather than a stored picture, there is nothing to unwrap and no seams. The colour exists everywhere at once. Drop the field onto a shape's fill and it is asked for a colour at every point on the surface.
Noise, gradients, patterns like checker and stripes, and sampled images all arrive as colour fields, so they all plug into the same fill inputs.
A colour field has no fixed resolution. Colour is computed wherever you look rather than read out of pixels, so it stays crisp at any scale.
Sources
Noise for organic, cloudy variation across a shape. It is greyscale by default; turn Monochrome off and red, green and blue each get their own noise, or leave it on and set Colour A and Colour B to run the values through two colours of your choosing.
Gradients for smooth fades, linear between two points or radial from a centre.
Patterns: checkerboard, stripes, rings, dots, hexagons, spirals.
Voronoi for cracked-cell, scattered and organic-tile looks. Set Pattern's Valence to Colour and every cell comes back its own flat colour rather than a number, which is the mosaic look with no gradient needed.
Images: feed in a raster and it becomes a colour field, sampled across the surface.
A single flat colour is the simplest colour field of all.
How to use it
Wire any colour generator into the fill input of a shape and it paints across the surface. Use Mix to blend two colour fields, layer a pattern over noise, or tint an image.
Everything stays a formula until the moment it is drawn, so colour fields can be transformed, warped and combined freely. The result is recomputed each cook.
To sit an image on a shape, plug the raster straight into a fill. The conversion to a colour field is inserted automatically. See Automatic conversion.
Gotcha
A colour field carries a colour space, which determines how its values are interpreted on the way to the screen. Painted, hand-picked colours (noise, gradients, patterns) are treated as display-intent, the colours you see in a picker. Scene-referred colours such as light and emission can go far brighter than white and are left unclamped, so glow and bloom survive.
A fill showing a magenta and black checker is the missing-asset placeholder. The file behind that image is not where the project expects it, or an importer ran and rejected it. This is not a loading state: a re-import in flight keeps showing the last good pixels, so nothing flashes to magenta while it works. The entry is listed in the Missing Assets panel, with Retry, Reveal in Finder and Copy Path.
Where a field's colour space is wrong rather than merely different, Color Space restates it. Set Source Space to what the pixels actually are and Target Space to what you want out, choosing among the working space, sRGB, linear sRGB and ACEScg. See Colour management for how colour spaces flow through a project.