Hi Pascal,
Yes, definitely the level of smartness would be welcome and make sense.
Only as one option. This could be more common use but everyone (or even every project) could have its own unique needs for the layer organization and color-coding. Having said that I think your other assumptions and solutions are correct and would make the whole system flexible.
Here is my simple summary:
- By default any new layer has no custom display color (No Color setting)
- Nested layers inherit the custom color or no color from their immediate parent.
- If the nested layer has assigned custom color, then that overrides the color from Parent Layer
This way you may not need 4 properties, just 2: custom color or no color. Auto-parent Inheritance is the ‘smarts’. I think it would make it all simpler and more intuitive.
The only question is what happens once you change the color/no color of the parent - do the children reset to inherit the new color, or the ones with custom color retain the color. I like the 2nd case (retain).
Here is a sample of how it is handled in “other software” (OK, it’s Photoshop. I know some developers here are a bit allergic to comparing photo-editing software to Rhino3D but there are a lot of things these two products could learn from each other!)
https://www.screencast.com/t/kv2y5XegVDKF
thanks,
–jarek