Hi, I’m pretty new to Blender but I have made some models that I want to “paint”. I dont know if that’s the correct terminology but for example, when I print them in my 3D printer I then paint them afterwards and that’s what I’m trying to accomplish here.
I want them to look like tabletop painted models you’d use in something like D&D. I understand UV wrapping/unwrapping etc so if that’s the way let me know. These are super complex models with hundreds of thousands of tiny polygons (right term?). I’ve tried zooming in on them and highlighting and changing the color of said polygons however this is super time consuming. There has to be a better way? Even if it’s not Blender or another tool or I’m missing something easy, what is it?
Bottom line, how do I “paint” my models in blender with the end goal being that they look like they were actually painted with a tiny brush; this of course means that any spillover is ok! The better the detail is good so…fire away!
Awesome thanks! So Blender is a decent place to paint then I take it. I was wondering what kind of responses I was going to get, maybe even software recommendations but that works. And I love Grant’s videos!
It’s an option, to see how it works out for you. If it happens to drive you nuts, like it did for me, then there are other options, none of which are really free, but are at least fairly ‘cheap’ and way more powerful.
From cheapest and sort of least powerful to most expensive.
ArmorPaint (https://armorpaint.org/) - very low cost, so can be worth a look, but didn’t really work out for me. Your needs maybe different.
Substance Painter (yes, its now Adobe, boo, hiss) however, you can get a permanent license that will get updates during the year you buy it in, via Steam. Downside, is you need the Steam Client and account, but outside that it works just the same as the subscription one. Pretty darn powerful, more or less ‘Industry Standard’ and hence a mass of tutorials, etc for it (even one I did: https://youtu.be/BHXk2rl01Og).
3DCoat Textura (https://pilgway.com/product/3dcoattextura), another very viable option more or less comparable with Painter. You can get a 30 day trial to really test it out (not something you can easily do with Painter).
InstaMAT (https://instamaterial.com/) the new kid on the block, pretty much Substance Painter and Designer all rolled into one. Not tried it and being new may have a few rough edges (along with way less info/tutorials then Painter). Can get a fully functional ‘free’ version, if you want.
There’s some others, like Mari, but that’s really high-end and super expensive, so I wouldn’t bother.
Texture Paint is the best for simplified models, but if you are limited with your UV because of dense triangular topology, you might try painting in the Sculpt Mode to a Color Attribute that you can plug into a shader.
Screen shot just to show the brush and the basic output - there is a lot of control in the brush itself so you can achieve several effects in one.
I am trying to learn how best to set up brushes as assets to be able to share things easier for picking up from the Asset Manager, and I just saw that 4.2 is supposed to have some better methods with brushes and assets. I have found a lot of joy painting in the 2d and the 3d views, but some of the changes in the past to separate the brushes as tools kinda made it harder for me to navigate brushes, but now we should be able to make a favorites asset folder for brushes we want to always have access to.
Yes the truth is that I am lazy and have never organized my assets (well only just started little by little), I have read that there is work going on with brush assets etc and plans to have downloadable brush assets in Blender org. I need to catch up on the progress.
Yes as I said Blenders texture paint is a bit DIY.
You can use any Image as a texture for your brush, the brush will paint that image. This can be a fully blown coloured image (like the bricks and rocks) or a Small brush image (like the black and white texture in my screenshot, which I used for the green and whitish things on the face).
For brush images it is best to use a white and alpha image like this:
(although it looks grey and white in the forum it is actually white and alpha).
There are many parameters in the brush settings to tell the brush how to map and react to the surface while you paint.
As for layers yes you can set up layers in the shader editor similar to photoshop using the mix colour node and 2 different images (one for each layer).
Then in texture paint paint on each layer separately, the mixing is done in the shader editor with the colour mix node (you can set it to mix, multiply, subtract etc etc.
It is all a lot of manual work to build layers but there are free addons that will set the nodes up for you. I will look for a link for you (there was one fairly recent one here on BA).
The basics functions for painting textures are all there already in Blender but they are no very practically implemented.
Ok there are quite a few addons that make the layers for you, this is not the one that I was thinking of but I have downloaded it and it seems to work very well with loads of options!
There is a git-hub link in the you tube video’s description.
I sets up all the nodes in the shader editor automatically you do everything in texture paint mode.
I am still trying it out but its working fine in 4.2.
There are others you could checkout as well like this one;
People forget that there is Quixel Mixer, and painting and material creation suite, free with an Epic Games account ( also free) though they are for use with Unreal engine only…with a Quixel bridge you have access to Megascans Library in Blender, so creating and using in Blender is part of the workflow before sending to Unreal Engine ( if you ever get around to it)…
Partly forgot, but when I trialed it, I uninstalled after about 5 mins.
Also, last I heard, development on it had stopped, if you go to download it the latest version is from 2022 and its a beta.
For the most part it just seemed to be a front end to the Megascans Library and I think access to that is basically integrated in UE anyway.
On the actual painting thing, though … I really like the responsiveness of the paintbrush in sculpt mode. And it’s flexibility since, unlike ZBrush, vertex data can directly be plugged into more complex shaders (very good).
I really wished there was more than just the one brush, though. Also unlike ZBrush, smoothing doesn not happen to be split into RGB and sculpt data in Blender (very bad). I keep wanting to smooth only the painted details. Overall it’s still pretty nice, though. And it works much better and stable than actual texture painting.
