Painting textures in blender

This Blender Texture Paint Tutorial explains how to paint directly on objects. We will cover all kinds of texture paint techniques that you can use in Blender. Texture Painting is a process of making your own textures by using painting tools on the 2D image that is projected onto 3D objects. Usually texture painting is used to create a stylized look, especially looking good on the low-poly models. 

Texture painting also can be a way of creating details. Meaning that you can literally paint the details onto the object instead of making them out of geometry and wasting polygons on that.

Details painted on the object

Start Texture Painting

To start Texture Painting in Blender, first of all you need to create an object. A default Cube would be fine too. After that you need to create a UV map of the object. Default objects come with one ready, but more complex objects need one created. We have a good tutorial on how to do that and more – Blender UV Mapping Tutorial.

After a UV Map is created, we almost can start Texture Painting. A good idea would be to change to the “Texture Paint” Workspace from the top of the interface. It should look something like this:

On the left there is an Image Editor, then 3D Viewport opened in the Texture Paint mode. And the Properties Editor is opened on the Active Tool and Workspace settings, so we could control our brushes.

But before proceeding, you should notice that your object is pink and you can not draw anything on it, there is an error coming up.

This means that there is no image to draw on. You need an image that would be connected to the object and that would save the information about your painting. 

Adding an image is easy. In the Properties editor at the top just click on the “+” button, where No texture is written. There would be a couple of options here, they are the kinds of textures that you can work on. Now we only need a Base Color, so choose that and in the appeared window you need to set a Name of the image, its resolution, color and other info.

After this is done, you can click OK and a new image would be generated. Then you can find the image and open it in the Image Editor to see all the changes in the real time.

And it is done. You are now ready to paint on your object whatever you like. Just start clicking on it with the brush active. 

You will see that all the changes that you make to the object also would be visible in the Image Editor with the UV Map showing you on which part of the object the changes were made. 

You can paint on both the object itself and in the Image Editor on the image, following the UV map.

Texture Paint Tools

In the top left corner of the Blender Texture Paint mode in 3D Viewport you can see that there are a couple of different tools available. Let’s look into them a bit and list them:

• Draw tool. The main and most important one. Allows you to draw on the object using different colors and Blend modes. 

• Soften brush blurs the lines making them not as sharp. In the real world it is similar to when you use water to soften the lines of the paint.

• Smear tool makes it as if you would smear the paint with your finger. Making the colors that you smear – blend.

• Clone copies the last thing you drew with the Draw Tool and draws it again.

• Fill tool is quite understandable. Simply fills everything with a single color of your choosing. 

• Mask tool. If you have a Stencil Image created in the Masking settings that situated in the Header of the 3D Viewport – you can mask parts of the 3D object, so they would be forbidden to draw on.

Texture Paint Brush Settings

When you selected any of the mentioned above brushes – in the Properties Editor there a lot of different new settings appear. We are not going to look at the all settings for the all brushes, but it will be nice to return and learn more about the main Draw brush.

At the top there is a Material Mode setting and Texture creation section that we used to create an image to work on. 

Then is the Brushes section, but there are no selection of brushes available in the Blender at the moment.

The most important section is probably the Brush Settings. There you can change a Blend mode at which we are going to look later, the Radius and Strength of your brush and its colors between which you can swap and also save the colors in the Color Palette.

Then there some Advanced settings, settings for Textures and Masking. Also there you can find settings for Strokes. These settings will change how you apply paint to the object. For example make it dotted instead of constant or a straight line.

And finally at the bottom you can change the Falloff. This one is quite interesting, because the different falloffs can make a really big difference on the end result of the texture.

Another important setting here is the Symmetry. If it is turned on – it will mirror everything you do onto the other planes that you select. This is extremely helpful in the Texture Painting.

Texture Paint Blend Options

Returning back to the Blend Options. 

We will not go into each of them, because there are simply too many. Though let’s look at some of them that are most used and most important. The default one is Mix. And it does what it says – if two colors collide – they will be mixed. So for example if I paint red over blue – I will get a purple color.

You should have noticed that there are kind of sections of the Blend modes. Meaning that some options are grouped together and separated from others.

After Mix goes the Darken group. They are different from Mix in the way that they don’t simply mix colors, but also darken them in different ways. So instead of the purple color you will receive some dark blues or really dark purples. 

Next group is the opposite of previous ones. Instead of darkening – they lighten colors in different ways.

Group that we are going to look at now is really interesting and unusual. Just by itself it takes opposite colors from the ones I choose. Opposite meaning opposite on the color wheel, where you choose color. So my blue and red turn into yellow and cyan, which create green on the overlap:

But the interesting part here is not in the colors that we get themselves. The trick here is to overlap it on the original color. So you can see that they interact differently this time. For example Subtract did subtract all of the color and replaced it with black. While Exclusion excluded everything but the selected color. 

Second to last group has a bit of everything and they also interact with original colors. Hue creates a hue of the chosen color over another one and can’t be used on the Alpha. Saturation simply increases the saturation of the colors no matter what settings you choose. Color is similar to Hue and Value takes the brightness value that you are using and ignores other settings.

The last two are simply to Erase and Add back Alpha.

Conclusion

There is a lot to Blender Texture Paint. And it is a really important skill if you are into making textures yourself, especially textures for games, as that is where this skill is used a lot. One of the main advantages of texture painting is that it allows you to create highly-detailed objects while maintaining low polygon count.

Hand-painted shield

See also our other Blender Tutorials and top 3D Model Reviews.

With texture painting on Blender, there are a few steps to take before pulling out that pain brush and painting your model.

Also, the complexity of texture painting will also depend on the complexity of your model. So in this mini guide I opt to demonstrate the steps to texture painting using a very basic model such as a cube.

The assumption here is that if you are a decent to good modeller, then you likely know how to texture paint. In essence, this is a starting guide and using a basic model will likely get the message across which you can then replicate on more complex shapes and geometry.

So What Is Blender Texture Paint?

As the name suggests, Blender’s text paint is a built-in paint feature designed so that you can physically paint over your UV textures which then transposes onto your model. Alternatively, you can physically paint over your model which then transposes over your UV textures.

Of course there is an other option, where you can download your UV texture and edit that externally using photo editing tools like Photoshop or Gimp and then re-upload to your 3D model.

However, in this example we’ll be doing the drawing / editing directly on the model using Blender’s texture paint tool!

Let’s take a look at the steps we shall be covering

So let’s getting started with the step-by-step guide… remember we’ll be using a simple cube for demonstration purposes.

Step 1: UV Unwrapping Your Blender Model

Load up Blender and conveniently the default cube shows up.

Go into ‘Edit Mode’ by left clicking the cube and then choosing ‘Edit Mode’ at the top menu.

In the newer version of Blender (2.92.0) the cube will already be highlighted in orange. If not highlighted in orange, simply hit the ‘A’ key on the keyboard to highlight it.

Now we want to UV unwrap the model, which is essentially the process of turning your 3D model and flattening it into 2D sections.

To do this, while in ‘Edit Mode’ (and model highlighted in orange), simply hit ‘U’ on your keyboard and then click ‘Smart UV Project’ from the menu.

Step 2: Accessing Blender’s Texture Paint Panel

At this point it would appear nothing happened, but you will now need to click the ‘Texture Paint’ tab on the top menu to see the texture paint panel AND your model in flat pack!

Step 3: How To Add A Base Color (a little like a primer coat before painting)

Notice above how your model has turned purple?

That means it has no texture to paint on. So at it stands we cannot paint anything on our model until we add a base color.

To do this, click on the ‘texture draw’ tab, then the ‘+’ button and finally select ‘Base Color‘ from the drop down list!

You’ve finally added a base color and your model should have turned grey!

Step 4: Choosing Different Brushes & Paint Types

What we are going to do is select a color from the color wheel (in this case blue) and then move our cursor (which is now a circle) over our model and start painting it but left clicking the mouse button and holding it down.

Note: The cursor circle (aka brush stroke diameter) can be increased or decreased in size using ‘[‘ or ‘]’ keys on your keyboard.

Step 5: Seeing Your Paint On UV Unwrap

One thing your might notice is that while painting your model, you will not see the paint show up on your UV unwrap.

That’s because you need to change one setting and everything is sorted.

Simply click the arrow pointing downwards and select ‘Material Base Color’ from the drop down menu.

Note: Now while you continuing drawing on your model, you will see your UV unwrap update in real time

You are done!

Texture Paint Brushes

By default, there is only one brush type on Blender, which limits the type of stroke you may want to paint on your model. It looks like this:

It’s possible to customize your own paint brush stroke. However, why do that when you can use a photo editing tool such as GIMP that already has an array of predefined brushes at hand?

In Step 2, we have UV unwrapped the model. This essentially breaks the model down into a flat pack. In the case of a 3D cube, the model has been broken down into 6 squares and laid down flat.

Export the flat pack (unwrapped map) and then import into GIMP. From there simply paint your texture using the array of brushes available.

Once completed, import it back into Blender and all your work will reflect onto your 3D model.

Blender Texture Paint Not Working

A common complaint by Blender users is the texture paint feature often not working. As far as I can tell, there is no bug or issue with the feature itself and it’s often the user not following the instructions properly.

I believe the biggest culprit is forgetting to set the model to “Base Color”. Miss this step and you’ll not be able to paint on the model, giving the impression the feature is broken and not working.

For a better understanding, go to Step 3 in the instructions above.

Closing Thoughts On Texture Painting

This is yet an other powerful feature that Blender has on offer. And as you may have guessed, this skill is vitally important for the making of games in the gaming industry.

The primary advantage of texture paining is it allows for the creation of highly detailed models that are made up of low polygon count.

Essentially, the texture design can be detailed enough to hide the fact the model has a low polygon count. Low polygon count models allow for faster render times and nicer texture designs provide a better gaming experience.

Introduction to Texture Painting in Blender

Blender is one of the free software that can be used to create 3D animation, motion graphics and computer graphics tools setup and attributions that can be used for all the project aspects and requirements. There are many attribution and work methods out of this today we are going to see texture painting work tool details, its performance, its performances and multiple uses of it. Texture Painting tool is slightly similar to ms paint options, and this color the created will be applied to models which will be already having default Lambert (default color to models which is gray). Texture painting is the traditional method of texturing that is available within Blender.

How to Use Texture Paint Mode in The Blender?

Texture paint is similar to the ms paint tool, where there is a slight difference in usage of the tool as this tool is integrated with Blender animation software. We can use texture painting too directly to paint on to the model option and also using the UV window painting option we shall see in detail below. In the initial process, we shall make the blender software available on our devices and then open it.

Step 1: Create a Model using Line, Polygon, and vertices and shapes with Blender and create the model as required before using the texture paint tool. Create a model on which it should be used. Here in the demo, we are going to taking a portrait of the paint frame. And we shall use the texture paint tool to paint pictures on its front side of the portrait.

Step 2: Create 2 new screen windows by dragging the corners of the work screen. So now, in total, we shall have 3 prospective of the model to view at the same time. The 1^st one remains in model mode, the 2^nd one as UV mode and the 3^rd one with Node editor mode, as shown below.

Step 3: Change the render engine, which is default as Blender render to Cycles render. To perform the dynamics faster so then the color applied in UV will be reflected on the model, and if we apply color on the model, it quickly reflects on the UV texture map. The speediness also represents the System configuration so use a good performing system. For the best experience of making things awesome and visual realistic to view and experience.

Step 4: Enable the Use Nodes option available from the node-based editing tool at the left bottom corner. This creates a basic texture sink between both models and UV texture maps. Whenever the color is painted, it will be in the sink in both the places. We can make a few more edits using a Node-based editor; we shall see them in further conversations below.

Step 5: Other than default texture Lambert (File), we can create our own texture file with basic background color as a background. Use the material options on the right side of the application as shown in the below image and create a new file by clicking the + button on the material type. New material creates as “Material1” rename it by using mouse selection completely and type texture name wanted.

Step 6: We shall unwrap the model using UV smart project option. To do this, we shall go to the model window. Change the mode of editing to object. Whenever we unwrap the model, we need to change the mode to object the complete objects unwrapped. Whereas if we unwrap in editing mode, only the selected face gets unwrapped, and the remaining face must be unwrapped again, which may cause overlap, or it takes time to unwrap each time and is not a best practice for unwrapping.

Do set mode to object and go to shading and UV’s from the right corner pane. Click on the UV mapping dropdown and select “Smart UV Project”, which helps to unfold the face smoothly and with few basic settings.

After clicking on the smart UV Project, we see this window popping up where we can change a few settings such as Angle Limit, Island Margin, and Area Weight, etc. Now we shall talk about Island Margin, which helps in keeping margin distance between each face in UV while unwrapping.

After clicking on Ok, we can see all the faces in the UV map window got unwrapped along with the margin as planned.

Step 7: Now, we shall work on the UV mapping pane. Click on the +New button to create a new default texture. If we already have a texture, we can add it using the open option beside it. After clicking +New, a new window opens showing the below details. Create a name for the texture; set Width and Height as requires; color can be selected if we want to give solid background color; we can go with it by selecting black. And click Ok to reflect it in on the UV mapping.

Step 8: As we have seen, the new texture created is applied to UV, and now we shall save the texture in our PC in local drive space to directly load in the future, avoiding losing of files. Click on Image and select Save As Image, and the saving browser window opens to save the file as required and easy to access to load.

Step 9: We can use the texture paint tool to directly paint on the model by changing the Object mode to Texture Paint mode, as shown below.

Step 10: We can see the complete model turns to magenta as there is no texture assigned, so it’s transparent. To add texture saved earlier. Go to nodes window, click Add and click on Texture and select Image texture. A new Image texture window loads in the nodes pane.

Step 11: Click on open and load the texture into the node and sync by joining them.

Step 12: Set UV map also to paint mode from the bottom corner as shown. We can paint by UV map texture area and directly by painting on a model that will be in the sink as we mapped those using nodes. Use multiple colors and options of stroke, a radius of brushes, etc., to make your texture pain and model more attractive.

We can even rotate UV’s based on Habits and practices for the demo painting we have done.

Conclusion – Texture Painting in Blender

This helps to make our own creative things to attract and showcase in resume to grab opportunities in the interviews. This technique is used more in creating games, small education training animation videos, storytelling, etc., as they look more handmade and attract clients, and we can put out of box thoughts to add creativity with practice.

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to Texture Painting in Blender. Here we discuss the Introduction and how to use texture paint mode in a blender, along with its Steps. You may also look at the following articles to learn more-

1. Steps to Apply Texture in 3Ds Max
2. Top 9 Plugins in 3ds Max
3. 8 Types of Adobe Illustrator Tools
4. Blender Tools (Types and Features)
5. Complete Guide to Types of Adobe
6. How to Add Texture in Illustrator?

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About Author

My name is Matthias from jayanam and we are recording gamedev tutorials for our youtube channel. We are also creating models and games using Blender, Unity, Krita and other applications.

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