Texture Painting Confusion... Odd Cursor, Paint on Other Side of Object

I’m in the Blender Guru 3.0 Donut tutorial, part 8, and in the Texture Paint workspace. MacBook Pro 16 M1Max, Monterey 12.1, Blender 3.0.0. I have several oddities.

  1. the cursor in the right window, where you paint directly onto the object, is not a simple circle like his, it’s a circle with a dot and crosshair in the middle. If I swipe off onto another desktop, then back again, it becomes a simple circle once more, but quickly reverts to the dot and crosshair in a circle.

  2. when I started painting I could see the effect in the left window, but nothing on the object itself. I finally spun the donut on a hunch, and sure enough, the painting was taking place on the far side. I would have thought the painting would be on the visible surface. No matter what rotation I put on the donut, the paint happens on the other side. I also note when he paints in the Viewport, along the equator of the donut, the paint line is across the middle of the texture map… in mine, the paint is off-center and oblique. Is there a reason for this? is there a setting I need to change?

  3. I’ve done UnDo several times to get back to an unblemished donut. Is there a simple command to clear the UV map and start afresh?

The attached screenshots show the donut without visible paint, and the odd placement on the map; and then the donut rotated to show where the paint really is (which probably matches the texture map location).


Hope you can help, as I can’t really go any further forward with this issue unresolved.

First to see the texture on the object you have to switch from “solid” on “material preview” top right in the shading options for the right windows.
Also you have to setup the material the the texture to see and paint on it.

To recreate the uv mapping select all faces in the right window and then recreate the uv map. You have to done the seams correctly for a good result.

Ok, I found that I was in “solid” view, and I had to switch to “material preview”, and yes I can now see the donut with all the work done on it so far, but this just changes the underlying appearance of the surface being painted. The painting appeared in the solid view as well. Blender Guru chooses to paint the donut in the solid view (I don’t know why). The paint is still appearing in the wrong location, however. And I can’t find a way to erase it, other than Ctrl-Z.

Re UV mapping we haven’t even touched that yet. We’ve worked with the Layout, Modeling, Sculpting, Shading and Texture Paint workspaces. In Shading we did some procedural work, merging the donut color into Base Color on the BSDF and Text Coordinate ->Noise Texture->Bump into Normal on the BSDF. When we then went into the Texture Paint workspace, the map was already in the left window.

BTW, in both the left and right panes, they have a bar of buttons on the third row from the top, that extends for miles off to the right of the pane showing things like Mix, Radius, Strength, etc. Is there a way to scroll just this row (rather than drag the window wider) so I can view all of the available buttons?

Thanks for the suggestion, it’s added a bit more to my admittedly scanty knowledge.

If all worked without errors from the donut sculpt there could be a correct UV map. But if this is not the case you have to do a UV mapping.

You can scroll the the bar with the mousewheel if the mouse is over it.