Where can I find a single site or book that catalogues the color of commonly found gems, rocks, wood, fabrics etc.? I need to define the color of tons of materials and this must be done somewhere..

I guess everyone defines the colors off the top of their head?

Common sense, general knowledge, encyclopaedias, taking your own photos... how could you classify such things anyway? How would you describe the colour? A description? (Too vague.) An RGB colour? (Not useful for printing purposes, no room for variation.)

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> how could you classify such things anyway?

I would classify them by material groups: wood, rock, metal, fabrics etc. Surely this has been done somewhere.

> How would you describe the colour?

The purpose is not to describe an exact color, the purpose is to enable a general comparison of colors within a category. Oak is darker than birch etc.

Do you mean material or just color ?

>Do you mean material or just color ?

What I have to do is define the RGB color of 356 materials grouped as wood, metal, gem and rock. I''m not looking for a site or book that defines the RGB color of all of these materials, rather gives me a _general_ idea what their differences are. For example. I have a general idea that wood is brown, but not how the different types compare to each other in lightness and saturation.

One of my 3d instructors told me once that many interior designers keep a box of "references"... they go around and take pictures of different materials and collect anything they think is "interesting"... then whenever they do anything, they look through the box and compare different materials and colors and see how they look together...

But in the mean time, http://textures.forrest.cz is a good site

Any more site/book ideas in this area?

If you go to a hardware store, a big one, they will usually have free color sample cards of paint and stain colors, which may include an array of woods. Woods are not actually all brown though. Think about birch (almost pink) and ebony (matte black). I also have a laaaarge image file that''s a complete array of all the colors horses come in, if you want it. What kind of project do you want this info for though? If you want your game to be able to tell numerically what color every object should be, that''s going to require a lot of arbitrary definition on your part.