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Rampage Documentation

What is Rampage?

Rampage is a color ramp preset manager for Blender. It lets you save any Color Ramp you have built as a named preset, and bring it back later in any project with a single click. What Blender does not offer out of the box is a way to keep a ramp you liked: close the file and it is gone. Rampage turns your ramps into a reusable library.

Beyond your own presets, Rampage ships with 449 ready-to-use gradients in 14 collections, from scientific colormaps designed for accurate data visualisation to hundreds of aesthetic gradients for design work. They are available the moment you install the add-on, with no setup.

Presets are stored as plain JSON files in Blender's configuration folder, not inside your .blend. This means a preset saved while working on one project is immediately available in every other project, and your library survives any individual file.

Rampage works in both the Shader Editor and the Geometry Nodes editor, on the same Color Ramp node you already use.

Requirements

Rampage is officially supported on official Blender releases only, currently from Blender 4.2 up to Blender 5.2. These are the versions Rampage is tested against.

Rampage has no external dependencies. It is pure Python using Blender's own API, so there is a single ZIP file that works on Windows, Linux and macOS alike, and installation never has to download or compile anything.

Rampage is not officially supported on unofficial Blender forks, because as a solo developer it is not realistic to test against every variant in existence. This includes, but is not limited to, forks such as Bforartists, K-Cycles, E-Cycles or Goo Engine.

Note: Being unsupported does not necessarily mean it will not work. Many forks only add features on top of a standard Blender base and leave the rest of the application untouched. Since Rampage carries no binary dependencies, it is likely to work on most forks. However, this cannot be guaranteed, since these forks cannot be tested. Use at your own risk.

Installation

The installation process is the same across all operating systems, and there is a single ZIP file for all of them.

  1. Download the add-on ZIP file from your order page.
  2. Open Blender and navigate to Edit › Preferences › Add-ons.
  3. Click the Install button in the top-right corner.
  4. Select the downloaded ZIP file and click Install Add-on.
  5. Enable the add-on by checking the box next to "Rampage".
  6. The add-on panel will appear in the Shader Editor and the Geometry Nodes Editor sidebars (press N) under the "Rampage" tab.

Quick Start

This guide will get you using Rampage in under a minute. We will apply a bundled gradient and then save one of your own.

  1. Open a Shader Editor and select any material.
  2. Press N to open the sidebar and go to the Rampage tab.
  3. Pick a collection from the dropdown, for example Matplotlib.
  4. Click the Apply icon on any preset row. If you have no Color Ramp selected, Rampage creates one for you, right in the middle of your view.
  5. Now edit that ramp by hand: move a stop, change a colour.
  6. Switch the collection dropdown to Custom, then click Save Ramp, give it a name and confirm.

Your ramp is now stored and will be there in every future project.

Interface Reference

The Rampage panel lives in the sidebar (press N) of the Shader Editor and the Geometry Nodes editor, under the "Rampage" tab. This section explains each control.

The Active Color Ramp

Everything Rampage does revolves around the active Color Ramp: the node it reads from when saving, and the node it writes to when applying.

Rampage considers a Color Ramp active when it is selected in the node editor. If exactly one Color Ramp node is selected, that is the target. If several are selected, Rampage treats the situation as ambiguous and acts as if none were selected, rather than guessing.

Note: Deselecting a node is enough to release it. Blender keeps "active" and "selected" as separate states, but Rampage always requires selection, so a node you deselected is never modified behind your back.

The panel tells you the current state: with no ramp selected it shows "Apply creates a new Color Ramp node", and the Save Ramp button is greyed out because there is nothing to capture.

Collections

A collection is a named group of presets. The dropdown at the top of the panel selects which one you are browsing.

Collections come in two kinds, and the icon beside the dropdown tells you which you are in:

  • Pencil icon = your collections. Fully editable. You can save, overwrite, rename and delete presets here.
  • Lock icon = factory collections. Read-only. These ship with the add-on and cannot be modified, so an update can improve them without conflicting with your own work. You can still apply, preview and favourite anything in them.

The dropdown is split into two labelled sections. Factory lists the 14 bundled collections; User holds Favorites, the default Custom collection, and any collection you create.

Creating a collection

Click the + button next to the dropdown, give it a name and confirm. The new collection becomes active immediately.

Deleting a collection

Click the trash button. You will be asked to confirm, and told how many presets will be lost.

The trash button is greyed out for factory collections, for Custom, and for Favorites. Those cannot be deleted: Custom is the default destination for saved presets, and Favorites is not a real collection.

Warning: Deleting a collection removes every preset in it permanently. If any of those presets were favourited, those favourites are removed too, since they can no longer point at anything.

Preset Actions

Each preset is one row: a gradient chip, its name, and a set of action icons.

  • Apply: writes the preset onto the selected Color Ramp. With none selected, it creates a new Color Ramp node instead.
  • Preview (eye icon): opens a large preview of the gradient. See Preview Overlay below.
  • Favorite (star icon): adds or removes the preset from Favorites. A filled star means it is favourited.
  • Overwrite: replaces the preset's gradient with your currently selected ramp, keeping its name.
  • Rename: changes the preset's display name.
  • Delete: removes the preset, after confirmation.

The last three only appear in your own collections. In factory collections they are hidden entirely, so the row stays uncluttered rather than showing buttons that could never work.

When your selected Color Ramp matches a preset exactly, that preset's row is framed in a box. This is calculated live, not remembered. If you edit one stop by hand, the frame disappears on its own.

Applying Presets

Click the Apply icon on any preset row. The selected Color Ramp takes on the preset's colours, stop positions and interpolation mode.

If nothing is selected, Apply creates a new Color Ramp node for you, centred in your current view, already carrying the preset. The new node is left unconnected: guessing which socket you wanted would be wrong often enough to be a nuisance, so you cable it yourself.

Note: The new node is created selected and active, so applying a second preset right away replaces the gradient on that same node rather than creating another one. If you want a second node, click on empty space to deselect first.

Applying is a normal Blender action: Ctrl+Z undoes it, including removing a node that Apply created.

 

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