Colour fields
A formula that returns a colour at every point in space — so you can paint and texture without ever 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 gives back an RGBA colour — red, green, blue, and opacity.
Because it's a formula rather than a stored picture, there's nothing to unwrap and no seams to fight. The colour exists everywhere at once. Drop the field onto a shape's fill and DNA asks it for a colour at every point on the surface, painting it across the geometry point by point.
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 is a formula, not a baked image. It has no fixed resolution — it stays crisp at any scale because the colour is computed wherever you look, not read out of pixels.
When to reach for it
Reach for a colour field whenever you want to paint a surface procedurally:
Noise for organic, cloudy variation across a shape.
Gradients for smooth fades — linear between two points, or radial from a centre.
Patterns — checkerboard, stripes, rings, dots, hexagons, or spirals.
Voronoi for cracked-cell, scattered, or organic-tile looks.
Images — feed in a raster and it becomes a colour field automatically, sampled across your surface.
If you only need a single flat colour, that's just 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. Stack and combine them with utility.mix to blend two colour fields, layer a pattern over noise, or tint an image.
Because everything is a formula until the moment it's drawn, you can transform, warp, and combine colour fields freely — the result is recomputed each cook, always sharp.
Want an image to sit on a shape? Plug a raster straight into a fill. DNA performs the automatic conversion to a colour field for you — see Automatic conversion.
Gotcha
A colour field carries a colour space so it knows how its values should be 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, like light and emission, can go far brighter than white and are left unclamped so glow and bloom survive.
If a fill shows up as flat magenta, that's DNA's loud "missing image" signal — the texture hasn't finished loading yet. It'll resolve once the source is ready.
See Colour management for the full picture on how colour spaces flow through a project.