So just noticed that this basic thing when I’m trying to make skin texture and I need to use alot of dirrefent colors which I then blur to get that miscelanious noisy skin look is imppossibility in blender 3.3.
When I’m in texture paint workspace and trying to use the soften brush to blur the harsh edges of different tones I created seems that blender can only lag and I can’t usethe soften brush since the lagging is so overwhelming. This is just crap to say it straight. How is it that basic 2d painting can be like laggy ? I use box as blur mode to even get the soft brush to do anything in the first place since the gaussian is way too soft to do anything that I can even see.
Is there way to use soft brush in texture workspace without the lagging or is this a feature of blender and I need to do the texturing on some other program ?
Also the texture painting is lagging like hell basically the whole texture painting is laggy like hell. I Aslo tested this with cube so it’s not the geometrys fault and same thing the whole texture paint laggy as f…
In my testing so far, I’ve found the Texturing experience in Blender to be rather poor. If it’s a basic mesh and only a 1K texture then it mostly works OK, but as soon as the texture resolution increases, every brush, not just the soften one starts to lag out.
Try it on a little more complex mesh with 4K UDIM’s and one could almost go make a cup of coffee between brush strokes as they update on the viewport.
If you ‘disable’ the viewport and do all the brush action on the flat UV image then it can be much faster, but that removes the point of being able to directly paint of the model in 3D.
On and off texture painting has been very laggy for some and I’ve read and tried all the tricks that will so call speed it up, but none really work.
I’m still deep in the middle of working out exactly what sort of texturing workflow I’m going to use and so far have yet to decide.
I’d love to see some videos of what the Blender Studio does, because if it’s anything like my experience I don’t see how they could texture anything.
I only trying to make 2k texture so if 4k is that laggy then damn, this feature of blender is totally useless. How I should disable the 3d model viewport ?
That is a little bit like sculpt mode.
The more pixels are modified by brush, the more it is difficult for Blender.
On big textures, you can paint without lagging if you do minor changes with a small brush.
Blender is a software that is older than a quarter of a century.
At the beginning of texture paint mode, nobody was creating 4k textures.
The mode was mainly used for textures of game assets.
Since 2.8 refactor, work on viewport was about overlays, high poly support in sculpt mode, modifiers execution, … and recently, new color attributes painting in sculpt mode.
The work on texture workflow is still a todo task.
You can create a workspace that doesn’t have one. Mind you, its then basically a very poor 2D paint program, so may as well just use Krita at that point.
I find that even using a small brush, I draw a short line and 1-2 seconds later it shows up on screen.
To be more precise about WIP on texture workflow, you can test painting on images in sculpt mode, in 3.4 alpha.
That should be more responsive than texture paint mode.
The Work In Progress is about :
Paint modes will be fused into a unique one.
Same brushes basics for all painted data (textures or color attributes).
Notably, a brush falloff limited to surface of mesh like in sculpt mode. That is why, for the moment, such brush, experimental for textures, is available in sculpt mode.
There is also work about texture caches in stand-by and a new design that has been produced for texture layers and texture baking.
Blender’s poor performance for texture painting is a known issue, and one that they are working on improving. I’m not sure what kind of hardware you have, but if you have a lower spec system or are trying to texture paint high res high poly meshes in Eevee/material preview mode you may have difficulties. I know a lot of people don’t find texturing in Blender useless, so unless performance took a nose dive in 3.3, there may be a hardware issue, or if your hardware is decent, some other optimization issue, but it’s never been the most efficient software to texture in.
That said, I have painted on a couple of 4K textures for meshes with ~20,000 polys before without too much trouble, so I don’t think it should be impossible, but I have a Steam Substance Painter perpetual license now so I don’t texture in Blender anymore and wouldn’t notice if an update hit texture paint performance.
You could try ArmorPaint if you want an open source texturing software. It’s free if you can follow the instructions to compile it yourself off github, but not terribly expensive if you purchase the pre-compiled version to fund development. You can find tutorials on youtube. It’s not as good as Substance Painter, but it’s better than Blender’s native tools.
Epic has Quixel Mixer which is another free tool you could use for texturing. It’s closer to substance in terms of capability, though I found it counter-intuitive to learn and did not stick with it.
I use windows 10 latest version and nvidia rtx 2080 Ti with Intel Core i5-10400.
I paint in the solid mode and material preview mode. Seems it’s not even possible paint in render preview which would be the most consuming option. I don’t think the problem is my system it’s just buggy Blender design. Also I only use 2K texture which isn’t even that hd yet, but it is for my purpose. My polymodel is guite low res only 53K vertices.
I don’t know if that’s what they do, but I have found Blender’s paint mode to be good enough not for direct texturing, but rather for painting masks.
The way I use it:
-If the model is a high res sculpt, first bake it to a lower model, because you won’t be able to paint directly on the high detail version.
-Create multiple texture node trees for the different parts or color schemes that will be needed on the object.
-Paint masks to blend between these node trees. The mask is only used indirectly and with smooth gradients, so it doesn’t need a huge resolution and can keep a useable performance.
Their current workflow appears to involve b/w vertex paint masks to mix procedural textures and colors, and/or high res tileable textures, and then bake them down to a texture. This is how Simon Thommes is texturing most of Project: Heist - though he describes the human skin albedo as “more traditionally painted” (Source: I have a Blender Studio subscription).
But for the vertex paint masking, Simon is able to get decently Substance Painter like quality results out of this technique:
You can see Snow being textured with this technique here, with additional detailing here. Snow’s animation reel combined textures painted in Krita with procedural textures and vertex paint masking. These are free content that do not require a Blender Studio subscription to access.
If you need more masks than the eight vertex color paints a mesh can hold in Blender, you could use Red, Green, and Blue in Add mix mode combined with separate RGB shader nodes to give you three masks per a vertex paint. Andrew Price uses a technique like that but with textures here. It’s also a good example of how you can get a decent amount of complex detailing even with simple brushes by using the right overlays with the right mix nodes (Disclaimer: this tutorial requires paid assets to follow, but the technique works the same for other texture combinations).
But my general take from your reply is that when it comes to direct texture painting in Blender, they basically just don’t do that. So I guess they know the texture paint system lags out.
I think in my case, part of the problem is I’m trying out Dikkos technique, of using an alpha channel to layer the textures on top of each other. It works, but to make it work, you need to be in full texture preview mode in the viewport, rather then just solid mode with textures showing.
I’m planning to download quixel mixer and give that a play, just to see if it will work.
Overall, yes, Simon says it’s too unstable, but I can’t guarantee whether the more traditional texture painting for the skin texture albedo was done in Blender or not. Some of the brushes embedded in one of the character files look like they may have been used to texture the skin.
If they textured the skin in Krita, I would hypothesize they layed down some soft base colors as vertex colors in Blender before bringing the baked texture into Krita to further detail. Mostly because images like below suggest a some amount of work was vertex painting the skin too.
I think with the addition of some noise textures overlayed over the vertex group masks, one could potentially get pretty decent skin textures, or get them 90% of the way there with the vertex group masking approach. Quixel Mixer should have better texturing tools than Blender though (being a dedicated texturing software and all)
Yeah, at the moment on my initial test pass I’ve just used a general procedural shader to lay some colour down and then pull the baked images into Krita.
I will however have to look more into this vertex paint masks as it seems it could be a good option for texturing some objects.
