Apply material to vertex soft selection

[enthewhite]

Hello,

 

Would anybody happen to know a way to take a soft selection of vertices (i.e. from the volume select modifier) and apply a modifier to it to change either the material id of the connected faces or assign a vertex color to them?

 

I can easily use the volume select modifier to select faces instead of vertices, but this doesn't give me a soft selection and I would like the material of the selected geometry to blend with the original material.

 

I would just use vertex painting or make a custom UVW map but this needs to update as the model changes (hence the use of the volume select modifier)

 

Hope that makes sense, I am nearing my wit's end tonight.

 

Thanks for any tips,

 

Ian