Use a mesh to define a fill area? (Texture painting with mesh?)

Support Materials and Textures
1

Blender file:
paint with a mesh.blend (319.9 KB)

Example:

painting with a surface
painting with a surface1215×704 451 KB

I painstakingly and carefully made this black/white texture perfect with my mouse using the stabilize feature. I am wondering if there’s a better way to do this. So I started by creating a mesh that has a perfect curve representing the area of white I want.

Is there a way to use this to fill the desired area to possibly get an even more perfect texture more easily? Or perhaps it won’t be as perfect, but maybe a starting point.

(I didn’t include the texture file, figured it wouldn’t be needed since everything is clear as to the result I’m looking for.)

2

For this special lines i would make a second UVmap like this:

furryUVnew
furryUVnew1024×1024 41.4 KB

because it would almost perfectly match (maybe not so perfect on the inner leg). You could make this with any painting tool you like… or:
I assume you use a bezier spline moved it around converted it to mesh and shrinked wraped it? Do it just for one in front and one in back. no need to shrink, just convert to mesh… what i did:

select vertex for a full front poly and just make a face, dito for back poly , now merge with body, get in front view, edit mode box select all (only front will be selected), deselect the back poly, unwrap from view (border) resize in UV editor on x 0.5, invert selecting in editmode repeat process transform polu in UVeditor to the right… export UVs as imge for body and fron/back poly seperatly, edit on two layers in painting prog fill with black white maybe blur… use this as mix mask for color in a shader

3

Well, you can also just model the mesh you want to use as a paintbrush and use it to bake a mask texture.

4

Ah yes paintbrush… never used that… have to learn something :wink:

5

Can you explain a little more? So, you basically do a ray casting using cycles? What should I google search for more info?

6

I was just thinking about a simple texture baking using selected to active.

Then use the result texture as a mask to mix materials on the model.

7

Sounds like a good idea. Any tips on turning my edges into a face? Seems like it’s complicated in a way that none of the blender tools know what to do with it. Maybe a retopo tool?

8

Do you have a blend file that I can see?

Is that on the original one?

9

I think I have found a solution… Just a moment.

10

I believe the best way is to make a copy of your model divide front and back and use “mesh - knife project” with your edges object to cut the parts of the model you want to have as faces.

Finally I did something. There is a small difference because of the thickness of the line I used to cut the mesh, but its not a big deal, I presume.
paint with a mesh.blend (407.0 KB)

11

Nice. To divide the model I see I can use bisect. Is that what you used?

Edit: Looks like the best thing is to divide both the model and the edge loop and do back/front one at a time, then maybe join the result at the end, or heck maybe it’s better to keep them separate for easier bake.

12

Wait, I can just use a paintbrush on the faces or even paint by selected faces, etc. No need to bake.

13

It will depend on what you want to achieve.

14

No, I found out that the cuts were not so regular as I wanted, so…

I shrinkwapped the line over the mesh, then I converted it to a line…
After that I beveled the line to have some thickness and converted it in a mesh again.

After that I used a boolean modifier and subtracted it from the original mesh, after I’ve used a edge split modifier to separate the parts of the mesh I needed to delete.

I deleted the unecessary parts and merged the vertices by distance to be sure nothing was disconnected anymore.

That’s it.