I’m new to texture painting so I may have done something stupid. But I basically just painted right over an existing texture. I painted in the viewport onto the model and could see it update in the main base texture over in the left window. I hadn’t closed Blender or anything and I’d been working on the file, on and off for about a day and all of a sudden, all the texture paint is gone. On all the models where I painted it.
I didn’t save out the files as images as I figured the paint information is just stored within the Blender scene file.
Mhm. In 2.8 when you want to close it and didnt save the images blender will warn you. But you said you didnt closed it. Maybe its the undo system? You went back to modelling and pressed undo too often. This is on the developer list to have a better undo system for texture paint.
You wont get it back in any way but next time use a new image for texture paints… When you dont know how look it up in a short tutorial for texture paint.
I was working away on other things when it disappeared. I didn’t notice it suddenly go, I was just like… hmm, things look different. So I found out that once you paint, there’s an asterisk next to the ‘Image’ menu item, meaning that it’s unsaved.
I feel, like you say, that Blender should warn or better yet, just save the paint information along with the file.
Yeah, Blender doesn’t really save texture changes until you tell it to-- it keeps it in volatile memory, and eventually, it decides it doesn’t need that memory anymore. It’s dumb, it’s annoying, it probably qualifies as a bug but I’ve never reported it. It’s been the case since at least 2.78.
When you stop working on a texture, save or pack the texture, or it might not be there the next time you look.
Are you using Blender 2.8 right? If so, please try to remember what steps you had followed before and see if you can reproduce the moment you lose the texture paint job, for better explain that moment/situation here.
I was thinking… Maybe you created the texture slot as Single image instead of Material. And maybe then at some point you switched to LookDev/Rendered view and you thought you had lost your texture paint job. If you create the texture slot as Single image, in order to see the work in LookDev/Rendered view modes you must configure the Material nodes manually by adding the image in the Image Texture node.
However, the warning message should have been displayed when closing Blender if you had not manually saved the image.
