colormaps
Unreal Engine colormaps for visualization — ~80 colormaps from matplotlib's library packaged as DataAssets, color curves, textures, and individual color samples across 7 categories. Includes the perceptually-uniform set (viridis, plasma, magma, inferno, cividis, turbo), with Python workflows for adding more.
Active·since — views
What it is. A library of colormaps for Unreal Engine, available in
the formats you actually need for visualization: a DataAsset
(DA_Colormap) per colormap that carries source/group metadata plus
the rendered assets — color curves, textures, and individual color
samples.
The default library is matplotlib’s colormap collection ported into Unreal — ~80 colormaps across 7 categories. See the matplotlib colormap docs for the reference each one matches.
Why. Picking colormaps in Unreal is normally a one-off chore — gather references, eyeball gradients, build a color curve, sample to a texture. matplotlib already did this work for the visualization community. Bringing those palettes in directly skips the rebuild step and gives projects an off-the-shelf set of perceptually-aware maps.
What ships in the library
| Category | Maps | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Perceptually uniform (recommended) | 6 | turbo · viridis · plasma · inferno · magma · cividis |
| Sequential | 18 | Blues · Greens · Reds · YlOrBr · YlGnBu · PuBuGn · BuGn · YlGn (and 10 more) |
| Sequential (legacy) | 16 | gray · bone · spring · summer · autumn · hot · afmhot · copper (and 8 more) |
| Diverging | 12 | RdBu · RdYlBu · RdYlGn · Spectral · coolwarm · bwr · seismic (and 5 more) |
| Cyclic | 3 | twilight · twilight_shifted · hsv |
| Qualitative | 12 | Pastel1 · Paired · Accent · Set1 · Set2 · Set3 · tab10 · tab20 (and 4 more) |
| Miscellaneous | ~17 | terrain · gnuplot · cubehelix · jet · turbo · nipy_spectral · rainbow (and others) |
The perceptually-uniform set at the top is the modern recommendation
for scalar-field visualization — equal steps in the data map to equal
perceived steps in color, regardless of where on the map you are.
viridis, cividis, and turbo are the canonical defaults; jet and
rainbow are kept in the library but you probably shouldn’t reach for
them.
What you get per colormap
- DataAsset (
DA_Colormap) — carries source / group metadata (matplotlib category, name, type), references the rendered assets. Helper functions sort and filter by metadata. - Color curve — sampled at runtime to look up colors at arbitrary values.
- Texture — referenceable from materials for shader-side sampling.
- Individual color samples — N discrete colors at equal intervals for cases where you want banded output, not a continuous gradient.
Two access patterns: reach for the DataAsset (and let it orchestrate) or reach for the underlying asset directly — whichever fits the use case.