So, I’m getting to grips with texture painting in Blender.
However, is there anything in the pipeline to be able to paint whole materials? Without having to manually set up all the masks etc. That would be really nice!
I’m kind of surprised nobody has gone for it yet. I may have to get the python cob webs out!
EDIT: Here is a link to an old thread which is pretty much what I’m trying to achieve (Thanks Jamie B for uncovering that old thread!). Forum thread
I’d wait until we get more info on how the EEVEE Engine works, as it is the PBRish renderer for viewport that is being designed for 2.8, and hypersomniac is in the team of people working on it.
Myself, I’d like for some kind of autogenerated mask system that woudl work with both that and Cycles, so we could easily paint as you suggest. Already with Cycles, you can paint either on vertex color as mask between shaders or whole trees, or use image textures as masks to do the same and it isn’t that hard to set up at all - but there is no automatic ‘add mask’ button as of yet. I guess painting in a new material should add the indicated material node tree to the current with a mask to be painted to add the new material under the brush.
look up zero brush addon for blender
I’d like to see the Zerobrush adapted to the PBR that is to come with the EEVEE engine, post 2.8 is going to be great. I am working with Spirou4D on the Texture Paint Plus addon as well as our Artist Paint Panel and popup, and though not the same they do give you a lot of control for different kinds of projects.
edit: looks like the licensing is proprietary, so not on my list of things to support. Too bad. I buy add ons when I can, but they are gpl and free to put on any machine I want.
maybe this could help?
Hey guys, thanks for the input. I’ve had a look at all your suggestions.
I think what I’m really after, exactly, is to be able to paint TO multiple textures at the same time with different textures.
For example one brush with a diffuse, spec and normal texture, which applies to the objects diffuse,spec and normal at the same time.
At the moment, you have to paint them individually, which means they don’t match up. Not to mention being 3x time consuming, having to paint every single layer individually.
I was looking at the python API. It’s actually not that difficult to get the brush textures, layers, slots etc in code. Assigning correct textures to the correct target texture probably wouldn’t be that difficult. Just let the user select all that. The actual brush though, I may have to look at the source code. I’m not sure if you can use python API to change how the brush works.
I’ll dig a little deeper.
I remember an add-on that aimed to do this in blender, but the video is down now, also the thread seems to have died…
Then again, it was made by Lubos, who is the one who is developing armoury engine, so i doubt he has time to maintain any other previous projects 
heres the link to the thread, it shows that it can at least be done in blender anyway… not sure if the download link still works on there or not 
- https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?393998-Addon-PBR-Painter-Multi-texture-painting&highlight=
also, if your interested, heres an overview of how the nodes for emulating pbr shaders in this add-on were made (This is what lubos based his PBR node group on)
its a simple node group, i.e no fresnel fix or anything etc
And i have no idea why they plug the normal map into the displacement output…
That’s pretty much what I’m after! The download link is unfortunately expired. Might have to try and get hold of him and see if he could send the code. It would be good to even just have a look at the code to see how it works or take it and modify it.
