Multichannel Texture Painting

Support Materials and Textures
1

I’m working on creating a creature for a short film, and I’m about to begin texturing the thing. However, I’ve encountered a problem. I want the textures (Epidermal, Dermal, Sub-dermal, Displacement, Glossy, Reflection) to match each other. However, Blender doesn’t natively support painting more than one image at a time, each of which has a max of 4 channels (RGBA).

I’m open to using any software, plugin, etc. as long as it’s (legally) available for free, and I can transfer UV maps and geometry between it and Blender (I’m thinking I export the UV unwrapped mesh from Blender, import it, paint it, and simply save the textures to images).

What would you recommend I use?

2

I’ve been looking into how to best accomplish this as well. I think this can be done with either Substance Painter/Designer or Quixel Suite 2. (Neither of which are free) I think that it would be great if there were a way to do it with blender’s painting tools.

It does look like simultaneous multichannel texture painting can be done with this plugin: pbr_painter. The plugin looks unfinished but appears to work. The plugin seems to be designed around the PBR workflow but could probably be adapted to work for a different set of layers. (Like: Epidermal, Dermal, Sub-dermal, Displacement, Glossy, Reflection…)