I bet Substance Painter and Mari are currently the best texture painting software, but I’d prefer cheaper tools with perpetual licenses or the free ones. I tried Quixel Mixer, but it doesn’t have stencil feature and is quite limited.
I think Mask Tools add-on and ArmorPaint software have some great features. If you have used both of them, which one do you prefer to use and why?
What tools do you guys usually use for texture painting?
I’m only just starting out myself, but really am looking for something that will be usable over the long term (very long term) and isn’t expensive/subscription based.
At this stage, I’ve only played around with Blenders Texture Painting and at a general base level I think it would be OK, if it wasn’t for the shocking lag issues. Even with 2K images on a basic model direct painting can get a little laggy, and switching to blur or smear it will totally lag out. Doing anything on a 4K image is basically unusable.
I’ve been thinking about ArmorPaint, but just not sure, not like one can try it out, unless you want to compile it, which looks like a total pain.
Thanks for the info. I just found out ArmorPaint doesn’t have gradient tool
Just FYI, Substance Painter (and the rest too) is sold as a perpetual license on Steam. In the past years at Black Friday they did a 50% discount too.
Yeah. I’m just worried Adobe might stop selling the perpetual license in the future, as they did to Illustrator and Photoshop in the past, which made the files locked
Don’t forget 3D Coat as well. It is a fantastic texture painting tool and so much else as it is a superb digital sculpting and modelling tool too. But also there is a much more affordable version of 3D Coat called 3D Coat Textura that is only for texture painting. It still has a perpetual license and is fairly priced and still the product of a small innovative very customer focused company. Long may that continue hopefully.
I wish I could say more about Armour Paint as I have bought the compiled version a while or so back but have not had the time to get deeply into it. But for the price I would say it is worth getting and trying out for sure and also a project that deserves the support.
Yes, 3D Coat seems a very good affordable sculpting and texturing software
Nothing new (just the mentioned SP, QM and AP + pro/cons) but i saw this myself some time ago (just 2/3 month not the origianl 2 years):
I have also watched that video and tried Quixel Mixer afterwards, but I found it without stencil feature and quite limited
I don’t remember the details too much 
but it was/is interesting to see those tools all used to paint the same asset… but there are two years gone by now…
It’s worth the deep dive. its way more capable and featured than it first appears. the layer masking system is very deep.
Quixel Mixer forum moderator said the developers are aware that projection texturing system is a popular request, but nobody knows when it will be added. I liked its layer masking system, but I’m currently learning Blender painting system, since it has projection and node-based procedural texturing features
yep. all things are good to know! quixel is less of a painting app. though you can paint. its masks generation is quite cool to export and use to mix materials in blender native.