First off, thanks a ton @zranger1 – you’ve answered all of my questions well enough that with some fiddling I got the first question working!
I got your palette switcher code working perfectly, and implemented it on the Sinpulse 1D/2D/3D code by @Whitespace here as a proof of concept first. It works great, and that combined code would make a good addition to the pattern library (this is a pretty generically useful thing to solve) – @wizard I think it’d help people who don’t “grok” palettes a lot or who are coming from FastLED and get how it does Palettes. The helper function in this thread also enables all of the PaletteKnife magic helper bookmarklet to just work – PaletteKnife for FastLED can be ported with effectively zero changes to find and set palettes!
I hear what you’re both saying in terms of blending palettes, but I’m not sure the implementation is in-scope for me on this project unless either of you have time to write up some sample code – it’d really aid the implementation I’m doing, but I’m not quite sure I you well enough.
For an example – using the same project – why the blending would help me a lot, this linked below (8 second) video is using the concepts in this thread to modify the Honeycomb 2D pattern with two palettes; you can see the very abrupt cutover between them a couple of seconds in, which is certainly not ideal.
(Fun fact, this is 290 LEDs in one big fluffy coat).
Example PixelBlaze Palette Switching Coat