The Big Texture Paint Thread

Y’all.

They added something cool that I will have to try out - there is a new panel in the Brush/Brush Mask panel for adding a new Action for animation. Woohoo!!!

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Some things to consider when baking or rendering through camera to get paint textures:

  1. If rendering an image that you painted through the camera, you might consider plugging the output of the color mix node to the shader output without the shader involved to get the full color.

  2. Likewise, consider turning the texture interpolation in the Image Texture Node(s) from Linear to Closest to minimize detail loss.

  3. When combining or flattening images together using the mix node in the Compositor, if you plug the alpha of the image node into the mix node alpha, turn off the option in the mix node to ‘use second image’s alpha’, because you are already using it and don’t need to double the operation - it will recede your alpha’s edge if doubled.

Mari’s nodal texture painting is extremely similar to what exists in blender, although mari can handle heavier scenes. Besides the performance differences between blender and Mari, Blender mainly lacks vanilla baking and caching texture nodes.

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Huge node graph in Mari. Layer painting can be simpler, but painting using a node graph is really powerful. And Blender dev shouldn’t drop that. I only miss a couple of nodes

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I really like the way Mari handles painting from the videos I watched a long time ago, and one of the things I have kept asking for that Mari seems to already have is a way to visualize the Cavity Mask as an overlay up front, similar to how we see the Stencil Mask in our preferred color in the viewport.

In Mari, is the process like Blender’s with using single images stacked into the node tree, or do they use a layered image like PSD and access the layers as elements of the shader?

A really big thing for me that crosses into Sculpt mode is the idea that we could somehow view texture paint on a multires object while sculpting, and possibly toggle between modes to make adjustments in both.

Yes. Feedback about the proposal was not great ; when it came out.
Other priorities and too many confusions due to lacks of Blender, at that time.
It derived on request about materials or UV unwrapping.
Now, some unrelated issues have been solved.
Feedback would probably be more on point, nowadays.

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I think we need the same access to the current palette in all paint modes as we see in GPencil. I’ve tested it along and it really is nice to use, and I miss it in Texpaint.

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That is making sense for brushes of paint modes.
That could be too much for other color fields. But I think that would make sense to have a quick access to a palette for shader nodes, compositing nodes, object colors…
Out of scope of the topic of this thread, I think that would be useful that a Ctrl Left Click on any color field would display a Palette floating panel.

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I’m thinking at just the top bar as that is hard coded and I can’t access the code for that to do it myself that I’ve found so far.

Is texture painting known to be slow?

Sometimes when I use a brush on my human model the UI will freeze for a second before I get visual feedback.

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Yes is known to be slow when adding single strokes when certain texture size is used (e.g 4k , 8k it begins to lag the most) and unfortunately the same applies for vertex paint (although that one is more noticeable is heavy subdivided meshes)

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Vertex paint is a bit faster now (4.3). But texture painting is still a very old and buggy system, that needs a complete remake. :frowning:

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Wait, which “vertex paint” are we talking about here? The (relatively) new vertex painting in Sculpt Mode, or the ancient separate mode called “Vertex Paint”?

Because the vertex painting in sculpt mode is lightning fast. You can make yourself a 1920x1080 mesh grid and paint on it like an image, with absolutely no lag.

I’ve completely forgotten that the separate mode even existed. I just tested it out and it runs horribly. Is there any advantage to using it over the sculpt version?

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Yeah, i was talking about the one in sculpt mode. :slight_smile:

The old vertex paint system will be removed soon. The same way, there are plans for a new texture paint system, and it might become a priority for the next LTS (hopefully).

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Old Vertex Painting purpose has never been to color dense high poly meshes.
It was used to color low poly ones, to be used as gradient mask to mix shaders on base meshes, rendered subdivided by a modifier.
It appeared, at time, when computers did not have same capabilities.

Currently, it is still more pertinent to paint a Face Corner attribute than sculpt mode, who is pertinent only for Vertex attributes.
The same way, it is still more pertinent to use weight paint mode to paint float values having an influence on bones.
Sculpt Mode masks, face sets and mesh filters are not replacing all older tools, existing in older paint modes.
old_vertex_paint_vs_ sculpt_face_set

Texture Painting performance was improved in Image Editor ; but in 3D Viewport, it is another target.
There is an experimental tag, in main branch, to paint textures in Sculpt mode. Its performance is relative to improvement of Display Graphics Backend support (Vulkan, Metal).

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Texture painting lags when the brush takes up too many pixels in the 3d space. The update of the texture in two windows also adds to the slowdown.

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And there are also other anoying problems with texture painting.
It’s recurrent when I’m painting some part of a model, to find later that another part was overpainted and destroyed (even with ‘occlude’ and ‘backface culling’ on).
Currently I’m allways jumping from texture paint to sculpt, just to have the ability to hide/show facesets, and only paint on whats visible… It works, but it’s not practical.
Then there are those tools that you cannot control very well… Blur is way to soft, and Smear is way to strong, Clone is just a hack.
Also, Bleed sometimes misses pixels, making painting on seams a pain.
:frowning:

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I don’t use the default falloff curves and the default tool settings are kinda wonky. I make use of vertex groups and face select masking. I get errors when zoomed too far out, and I get missed areas even when painting with occlude and blackface culling turned off, and that might be because the old way of determining the angle is gone

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There is a way to paint large textures in Blender. Use resize. Start with a low-resolution texture, then resize and refine the details with a small brush size to avoid lag

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I saw the 3D brush being worked on a while ago by Jeroen, not sure what the latest is on that. Any plans on getting that in anytime soon?

Until then for myself it’d be hard to even consider using texture painting for other things than minor brushups.

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