The preview acts as a live viewport overlay. You can keep the channel preview active and continuously edit your main vertex color attribute—the grayscale visualization will update in real-time as you tweak your data. Because it only changes how Blender visualizes the channels in the viewport, your underlying production data remains perfectly clean and ready for FBX/OBJ export at any second.

Yes, absolutely. The core operations and gradient projections are heavily optimized to ensure smooth viewport performance. Whether you are adding color variation to thousands of leaves on a dense tree or packing dirt masks on high-resolution environment assets, the tools handle dense geometry efficiently.