I noticed there has been repeated requests for this feature on this forum and other sites over the years for Blender devs to add this feature due to the brush size enlarging in 3d view when you zoom away from the area you are painting whereas painting in the 2d view doesn’t have this issue but this eliminates the ability to paint across seams.
Is there a reason why this hasn’t been added for over 5 years now? Is this something that can be easily added as a free addon for people to use?
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Sculpt, Paint & Texture module was mainly orphan before Pablo’s arrival.
Campbell was fixing some bugs but his main fields of expertise are modeling tools and python API.
That lack of support may explain why Texture workflow was underestimated in 2.8 design.
Pablo was principally working on Sculpt mode since his arrival.
He is favorable to workflow mixing sculpting and painting under same mode.
He announced an ambitious project of refactoring of how painting stuff in Blender.
He developed Sculpt Vertex Colors and new paint brushes for that mode that are working as you expect.
What is missing is the part allowing to bake those vertex colors into a texture for a low poly model and the fusion of current paint modes into a new Attribute Edit mode.
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Surely that’s going to be improved, I think Pablo has plans for texture painting. However it’s good to note that sculpt and texture paint work very differently. In texture paint, pixels are projected onto the model from the view, whereas sculpt uses a physical cursor that has an actual location in space, and I suspect the latter is probably more obvious to make “absolute” in terms of size.
Thanks for the link but I doubt everyone would be on board with painting using vertex paint only. Some may not have high end cpus or some may be just personal preference of using textures instead. I personally prefer texture painting to vertex paint. I might give this a try. As for baking vertex colors to texture. XNormal can always be used for that tbh but I agree Blender has to have one too.
I hope so though I highly doubt we might see anything about it this year. Texture painting in Blender has had slow development over the years. I am thankful for udims. I am not sure why this has not been a thing since.
For this lock brush feature to be implemented, would that be a full overhaul of Blender’s texture painting system?
I don’t really know what this entails, but yeah I heard plans about moving away from projection painting. It must have been on a design task somewhere, but I can’t even remember whose idea it was. Sorry for the vagueness. Surely you can find some info about it by navigatind d.b.o.
No worries. Appreciate the info you have provided. Hopefully we hear something from Blender devs about this feature and if there is a reason this hasn’t been considered all these years.
I really appreciate all the work Pablo has done for Blender especially where sculpting and vertex paint is involved.
Texture painting similar to current one is supposed to be handled through the attribute edit mode.
So, that attribute mode is a huge target. Maybe, there will be some improvements related to texture brushes before its creation. But that would be done with the idea to support them in that future mode, too.
I don’t think so… these plans regard vertex colors, not raster textures. Pablo only mentions that “the design of the brush will be reused for texture painting”.
Thats why i purchased Substance Painter perpetual 2021 to use it until Blender has native Material Painting feature and/or Quixel Mixer reaches feature parity with Substance.
Oh they still offer perpetual licenses ? I might just be interested (for designer actually, not painter)
Yes from steam and if you hurry before February(do non remember exact date) you can link with Substance account and use stand alone versions without Steam running, minor difference but if you prefer Steam not running then there is difference. It is -20% on pre-order unil 29 Jan.
For me it could be the first and the last SPainter order as i really hope Mixer upgrades or Blender makes out of box Material Painter within some years.
I think i saw designer too, just not with discount. Edit: just checked and seems to be with discount too.
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I have done more experiments with Armor Paint which is free (u need to build it yourself which isn’t hard at all). If you can afford it, you can pay for the compiled version on gumroad which goes towards funding its development.
It has locked brush size. The brushes just needs more options like scatter, color dynamics e.t.c and the brushes are node based too.
There is also Mask tools for Blender. Haven’t tried it but its worth a spin:
Also u can use Blender natively:
But we need that lock brush size for proper utilization of the texture resolution being used while painting in Blender
Giving this a spin. Does sculpt vertex colors work with multiresolution? I am trying to paint but doesn’t work, also face sets does not work as well with multires modifier.
Well. Currently, that has not be done.
That was initial intention.
Multires support
We need to check the status and roadmap of Multires before tackling these tasks. If sculpting multires is not fully functional, it does not make sense to add color features to it.
Multires color data layer
A datalayer needs to be added to support vertex colors in Multires, similar to how the Sculpt Mask works.
This also needs all necessary updates to Multires to support vertex colors in the grids.
Multires level propagation
Color values need to be propagated across levels without creating artifacts.
Multires texture baking
After finishing these task, Sculpt/Vertex paint mode will be a more advance painting more than Texture paint and some users will want to use it as the main painting mode. Until we design and update texture paint to support all these painting features it would be nice to have some baking functionality to be able to work on texture colors by converting them to vertex colors. Sculpt mode can easily work with 17M vertices + duplicates on Multires, so supporting painting a baked 4K texture on vertex colors seems like a reasonable use case.
But yes. Current multires does not support data layer for anything else than mask.
Multires supports face sets effects (hiding, restriction of brush / filter effect).
But face sets can only be created at basemesh level.
Same thing for sculpt vertex colors, you have to enable Sculpt Base Mesh option to paint with a multires modifier on mesh. So, resolution of painting is polycount of base mesh.
You may encounter display refreshment problems. Disabling Face Sets and/or Mask Overlays is solving the issue for me.
It looks like there is a long road of multires improvements needed before reaching such goal.
Thanks for the info. I really wished we had lock brush size for texture painting. Its a little disappointing this does not exist after repeated request from users.
As for the multiresolution, thats unfortunate as well. I love the new performance boost it has gotten, would be nice to be able to paint face sets and vertex paint with it.
I guess the only option is to wait. How long that will take, we will never know but I am glad it is in the works. Kudos to the devs for the efforts they have made so far.
Is this still missing in 2.93? I could have sworn I was watching a video of texturing painting and they said you could lock it. But, I wasn’t paying attention at the moment, now I can’t find the video or I just misunderstood. Does 3.0 alpha have a texture painting brush lock perhaps? Looking at the blender manual I can’t find anything for this, I think misunderstood or heard something different.
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Sadly, it has been a struggle to convince the devs. that basic things like layers are important, but the recent editmode work gives me hope that if we can present the request as something that is showing to be a bottleneck in both production and in the adoption of Blender as a studio tool, it will not be in vain.
Ideally, the plan would be to have sculpt vertex colors fully working with multires, allowing us to bypass textures completely in many cases (depending on the resolution of the geometry).
It’s impossible to match a stroke and having to mesh out a multiresolution to paint on it seems kinda unoptimized… I get that blender isn’t THE go-to for this kinda thing, and you can be careful, but it’s so close to being amazing while missing things like this.
In 3.4 alpha, you can activate experimental Sculpt Texture Paint, in preferences.
That allows you to paint image textures in sculpt mode, with sculpt mode paint brush that can use a view or a scene radius unit.
But mulires modifier is not supported.
That is the current status of development.
That was just an experiment.
From that experiment, developers created a new design for paint mode, that will support recent sculpt mode innovations.
But that will take years of development.
There is only one developer working on module grouping sculpt and paint modes.
Currently, he is working on sculpt mode.
Any plans for this in 2024?