PBR Painter 2.0 has now been released, encompassing all of the great features from v1 with a bunch of cool new features and a brand new, more efficient design.
If you haven’t heard of PBR Painter before, it is a simple yet powerful addon designed to enable quick and easy PBR texture painting within Blender. It uses a layer-based, multichannel painting approach which lets you paint all of the channels of a PBR material (albedo, roughness, displacement, normals etc.) simultaneously. Materials can be created from scratch, by importing pre-made PBR texture maps, and/or by generating procedural textures separately for each channel.
PBR Painter automatically generates and manages complex node setups, giving you complete control over every aspect of every channel, allowing you to combine normals of stacked layers, create highly customisable layer masks, control the opacity of any channel of any layer and much more. This gives you complete freedom over all aspects of the material properties, without ever having to manually create a single node.
Some of the new features in v2.0 include:
Major overhaul of addon for a general improvement to performance and efficiency
Restructured UI for an even more intuitive and more user-friendly interface
Brand new mask creation tool, which uses a layered system to build complex and highly-specific masks (this is my new favourite feature!)
More options for each specific mask (which can individually be added to the layered setup)
New displacement threshold mask, which applies a mask according to the displacement of previous layers (very cool!)
New automated external texture saving after baking using a user-defined file directory (bolded for importance!)
New option to use a custom layer, which lets you build your own layer from scratch using your own node setups, which can then be painted as a layer as per normal (important for advanced users who need highly specific node setups)
New copy/paste functions for procedural texture setups, for copying between channels and/or between layers
New and improved texture autosaving feature
Some of the new features coming soon in v2.1:
New option to automatically import a complete set of material textures into multiple channels simultaneously with a single click (done in the alpha version)
New option to instantly link multiple channels to the layer mask automatically and simultaneously, speeding up the procedural workflow (done in the alpha version)
Brand new preset masks, already setup to achieve complicated and customisable masks (e.g. scratches, grunge etc.) (partially completed in the alpha version)
Hi, no sorry - I’ll be releasing v2.1 as an open beta (scheduled for mid-May), but the alpha will be private while features are being added and the version is undergoing initial testing etc.
Ho thanks for your wonderfull job! Your addon will help a lot of blender fans! Continue, I follow you and soon I will buy it to encourage you…
At soon.
Spirou4D
NB: Craig Jones and me have made an big addon before 2.80 to paint with layers in blender: EZpaint.
Hi, thank you for your words of encouragement and your support! If you do end up buying it, please do checkout the Discord server (or feel free to join anyway) if you want to send some feedback, request any features etc.
Will there be a way to use this to edit existing textures on meshes?
In the video it shows that pbr painter will remove existing material and textures on a model.
It would be great if it would add the painting on top of the existing materials, textures.
Yes definitely - this is next on the list of things to do. I’ll be looking to add the option to keep the current material as the background, rather than adding a new background node group. Then you can add to your existing materials with PBR Painter.
Is that what you’re meaning?
Later on, I’ll also be looking to add the option to import a material as a layer.
Typically I only use build updates (2.0.x) to fix bugs or make minor changes to the UI etc. In other words, usually nothing is introduced that is forwards incompatible. So nothing major in 2.0.9.
I generally use minor version updates (2.x) to add new features. And on that note, I’m releasing 2.1.0-beta as an open beta tomorrow, which will have the following new features:
Introduced option to instantly import and assign a set of textures (albedo, roughness, metallic, normals, emission etc) automatically by selecting the files in a folder
Introduced option to instantly link multiple channels to the layer mask automatically and simultaneously, speeding up the procedural workflow
Introduced new addon preferences (autosave now in addon preferences)
Moved background layer panel to more discrete button in UI
Introduced additional mapping options for masks
Introduced a mask multiplier for each channel, for finer control over channel masking (it is amazing how handy this actually is for procedural stuff!)
Introduced a range of preset procedural mask options (scratches, grunge, cracks etc), which are tunable and can be incorporated into the mask stack
The last feature (the preset masks) will be something that is regularly updated and extended upon, indefinitely.
Introduced option to instantly import and assign a set of textures (albedo, roughness, metallic, normals, emission etc) automatically by selecting the files in a folder
So this means we can use existing model with textures then add to it with pbr painter?
I would really like to see a video on how it’s done.
Yeah - If you have the model and individual textures, you could always do this by creating a layer and importing each texture into the channels. But you would have needed to do this manually, one texture at a time. The benefit of this change is that you can now select any number of textures (for any input in the principled shader) and they will be imported and automatically assigned to their respective channels. This is done by recognising channel tags in the file names, which themselves can be modified in the addon preferences.
I’ll be making a video outlining every new change in 2.1 which I’ll link here tomorrow.
One other thing that’s a big improvement is that when you initially setup the material for PBR Painter, you can now keep a prexisting node setup and use it as the background layer. So you can now modify existing node-based materials with PBR Painter layers.
So there are a couple of options now for modifying previously created materials with the addon’s layer system.
The v2.1 beta is now available to download for anyone who has purchased the addon. Here’s a detailed overview of everything that’s new, and how to take full advantage of the new features:
Also, I’ve added the addon to Gumroad for those who are interested.
Hello I tried out the beta 2.1 Beta on the Mac and when I create a new layer I don’t get the Background options. This happens if I copy the currently assigned shader or not.
I’m also curious if this nice addon will ever work with udims in Blender?
