Posted November 15, 2020 by RodZilla
The next release of Material Maker will have an exciting (at least it is for me) new feature that makes it possible to paint 3D models.
This release should be available before the end of the year, but I wanted to share a technology preview sooner to get feedback (and fix as many problems as possible before release). And "sooner" is now!
The tech preview can be downloaded (both Windows and linux versions are attached to this devlog) on itch.io. If you find bugs or have feedback, questions or ideas for future releases, please don't hesitate to use the comments section below.
Painting tools have quite a few limitations:
To start painting in Material Maker, just use the File -> New paint project menu. This will show a dialog where a model file and a texture size can be specified.
I recommend that you don't choose 4096x4096 of you have a low end GPU, but if you feel like trying, please don't hesitate to tell me how it works. When picking a .obj file, a paint project output file name and location will be chosen for you, but you can modify it if you wish.
When the paint project is created, Material maker will show new panels:
The paint panel shows the model and can be used to paint it.
The model can be rotated by holding the middle mouse button and translated by holding the middle mouse button and the Shift key.
The left mouse button (with no modifier) can be used to paint. Holding the Shift key and the left mouse button will modify the brush size (left - right) and hardness (up - down). Holding the Control key and the left mouse button will modify the pattern size and orientation (more about brushes and brush types below). Holding the Control key will also show the patten on the whole view (which can be useful with Pattern and UV pattern brushes).
The top left buttons are painting modes (freehand dots, freehand line, line, fill) that can be selected using the F1-F4 keys (beware, F4 fills right away and does not change mode). The color picking tool does not work yet. The Eraser can be toggled using the E key and used with all painting modes. Filling with the eraser enables will generally clean the layer (but the behavior could be different depending on the brush).
The bottom part of the panel shows the Brush graph. Creating a new brush is described below.
This panel just contains brushes that can be used to paint the model. To activate a brush, just double click on it. There are very few brushes available for now, but they show what can be done with procedural brushes:
This panel can be used to modify the brush parameters.
When creating a brush, adding a Remote node makes it possibel to add parameters to that panel.
The layers panel can be used to create, duplicate, remove and reorder layers. Transparency can also be defined for each channel of each layer.
Brushes are described in the graph subpanel in the main painting panel.
The Brush node accepts the following inputs:
Brushes have a parameter that define how the channel patterns are mapped:
The boolean parameters of the Brush node can be used to enable painting of each channel.
If you create nice new brushes, you can save them to the user brush library using the Tools->Add current brush to the user library menu entry.
To share brushes, just select the whole graph and copy it with Control+C, then paste it as text anywhere you want (text file, email, pastebin).
To use a shared brush, remove all nodes from the brush graph, copy the text for the brush, and paste it into the graph.