I recently tried substance painter out and found that it is so much more efficient to paint 4k textures. Usually when I paint 4k textures in Blender, there will be some noticable lags (especially with a large brush size), yet this is almost absent in substance painter.
I wonder what makes Blender a lot less efficient in this regards. Also whether the blender developers are aware of this issue and are working towards improving this area?
Substance Painter is a tool dedicated to texture painting (it’s animation tools suck).
Blender does have texture painting, but that’s not it’s main focus.
I know this, but I just wonder whether people know why texture painting is slow in blender? Is there any technical reasons behind it? Are blender devs knowing this and addressing this?
I think it’s because texture painting in Blender runs on the CPU unlike Substance Painter’s which runs on the GPU
Blender is a generalist free open source software.
Its development depends on a core of developers receiving contributions from community.
So, they may handle different parts of software and may communicate with a lot of people. As a consequence, they may simply progress slower than a focused team of a dedicated software.
For 3D Viewport, Blender has to handle an open library. During years, Blender was using OpenGL, while proprietary software could use Microsoft’s Direct X.
Nowadays, everybody will support Vulkan.
But Blender team waited that Vulkan become more mature, to be stronger, and a global refactor of software.
So, developers working on Vulkan are also working on development of other features than painting.
That is slow transition. Vulkan will be the default in 5.3.
First target was to have it working. Optimization will come later.
But Blender being generalist, focus can be animation in object mode, sculpting in sculpt mode, …, before painting in Texture Paint mode.
You are comparing a generl purpose car like for example a station wagon or estate car with some specialicst like a racing car or even a truck.
Some 3D painting app may use some “special internal data representation” better fitted for 3D painting than a general 3D app with some 3D painting added.
The same applies to sculpting.