Yeah, that would be pretty much the first step towards Painter like features, but no doubt it’s a much bigger task when needing to be built within Blender. It would touch on viewport performance, asset management, brush engine, baking. Best case is it would be years away.
Yeah, Mixer sort of lost me from the very start and the fact I couldn’t remap any shortcuts, especially for navigation. Material Maker had much the same problem (among other things) and I’m getting too old to constant fight muscle memory.
First thing I did with Painter was change a select few shortcuts for rotate/pan/zoom so it works the same as I have Blender. Also adjusted the transform keys to GSR and just ignore whichever keys any tutorial says for those things.
A lot can be said about 3DCoat or Substance Painter.
But now I will go off topic to talk about Blender. But this depends only one factor, if you really want to push your Blender-ness to the next level, rather than seek something that works great and out of the box.
As for example the typical workflows in “substance” are something like this. You get some robustness out of the box that allow you to play and experiment with ease (eg: adding color, having color+normal at the same time). Then you get some proceduralness that makes some sort of results fast and easy and fun (adding procedural rust).
These techniques as mentioned can be recreated with Blender
Essentially it means that you have to port all possible techniques and ideas of Substance Painter to Blender. However considering that the workflows in Blender are very costly in terms of robustness (they take a lot of effort to setup and time), they do not allow enough room for experimentation.
As of saying that literally you just paint rust, scratches, dust, bumps that are just simple texture-brushes (alpha brushes). However since you go with minimal toolset on this, is better to know exactly what you have to do before you do it. Essentially you transfer all substance techniques to Blender in an educated way. You have no room for experimentation due to lack of robustness.
Perhaps there can be some specific addon for Blender. These can provide some extra features, at least having layer management solve a good problem.
I did try messing around with Blender to start with, just that half the time even getting basic brush strokes was slow and laggy on models and resolutions that is just shouldn’t have been. Yet everything else from Krita to the various 3D painting apps I tried, not problem. I even had to lock 3DCoat to monitor refresh rate, otherwise it just ramped up my GPU as it pushed 300 fps in the viewport.
Hence I need to look for a better solution that didn’t cost too much.
Technically, your final review needs a little adjustment from a cost point of view. Sure the subscription for Painter is bigger money, but if one compares the Steam version of Painter to 3DCoat Textura, for me they are basically the same price.
IMO, blender should not try and be Substance Painter. I think too many changes are required for Blender to reach that level and BF resources are not infinite. Blender should instead play to its strengths and that is the node system.
I think Blender could create its own niche and sit inbetween Mari and Substance Designer. Have enough preset generators that it is useful for creating variation in textures or maybe even have a way for people to code their own generators. Update the texture painting system to be nice and responsive. When painting complex texture maps that are made using node setups.
Make it really good and hopefully the tutorials will roll in to help people settle into the new system.
Yeah, I think that’s one thing which hurts Armor Paint, it’s trying to do 3D Texturing using nodes which somewhat doesn’t work.
Where Painter is much more Photoshop for 3D, so just trying to make all that fit and work within Blenders over design and UI would be a massive amount of work and even then likely feel somewhat bolted on the side.
So, yup, resources way better spent on sticking to Blenders strengths. Guess time will tell.
