Texture Painting
Control Panel > Tools > Tools List > Texture Painting [+]
Description
A Texture is a scene block that colors the surface of an object. There are two types of Textures, procedural, which return the color based on an algorithm, and bitmaps or pixmaps, which return the color based on a spatially mapped array of pixels.
Texture Painting allows users to directly paint the bitmaps that are applied to an object. The Texture Painting tool works with a Paint Material, which stores the bitmaps that can be painted; and the Texture Painting Tool, which provides all the tools to paint the bitmaps, and allows multiple objects to be painted with the same stroke.
The Paint Material holds all the channels that can be painted (ambient, diffuse, bump, specular, normal, etc), and each channel holds all the layers that can be painted (canvas and background), and the auxiliary layers (pattern and mask).
Texture Painting works with two paint layers per channel. The canvas layers is the layer that can be painted directly with the paint tools (draw, erase, blur, etc.) and the background layer can only be modified by merging down the canvas layer into it. This two layers configuration allow users to protect the texture that is already finished while painting other parts of the object. Alternatively, these two layers can be mixed using blending modes like multiply and divide, and an opacity value.
Workflow
The user Adds objects to the Texture Painting session, if the object doesn't have a PaintMaterial applied, the Texture Painting tool asks the user if he wants to create and apply a new PaintMaterial to the object.
A Texture Channel needs to be created.
A Painting Mode needs to be defined.
Video Tutorial
Requirements
Any TriMesh or PolyMesh with an UVW Mesh can be painted. However, to get better results, the UVW Mesh needs that all faces are contained in the texture space (UVs from ( 0.0, 0.0 ) to ( 1.0, 1.0 )), that there are no face overlappings, and a small gap between UVW charts is recommended.
Paint Nodes
Only nodes that have been added to the Texture Painting session can be painted.
Add: When this button is checked, the user can pick a node in the scene with the mouse. If this node is a TriMeshObject, or a PolyMeshObject, then it is added to the list of nodes.
Remove: Removes a node from the Texture Painting session, so it can no longer be painted.
Bake: Bakes the Pattern Texture in the PaintMaterial for the selected object.
The Toolbar
Paint Modes
The Texture Painting tool provides 3 different 3D painting modes:
3D to UV
In this painting mode the mouse hit is converted to a bitmap position using the UV mesh, and then the bitmap is painted directly with the painting tool.
Advantages: WYSIWYG. All the painting tools are available in this painting mode.
Limitations: When the stroke is painted across two different uv elements, a visible seam is produced.
3D Paint
When this painting mode is started, all bitmap pixels are converted to 3D points in the world. When painting, the brush, which is converted to a 3D sphere, intersects this pixel points and paints them directly.
Advantages: of this painting mode is that the brush application can cross between different uv elements, producing a seamless texture.
Limitations: This painting mode does not produce continues strokes, instead, the brush is applied where the mouse hits the mesh.
Projection Painting
In this painting mode the user paints in the viewport screen, and then the painted image is transfered to the 3D objects' textures using an inverse raytracing algorithm.
Advantages: This painting mode can produce seamless textures.
Limitations: The painting tools are limited to work only with the screen image. When the screen image is projected to the object textures, the visual resolution can change.
Brush Options
The brush is
Painting Tools
Draw
The draw tool allows