Especially when texturing stylized NPR assets for games or animations, the comfortable painting of textures for 3D objects is necessary. For this purpose, several commercial applications such as Substance Painter, 3DCoat or InstaMAT are available externally from Blender.

However, for my own workflow for animations and games, I have been using a free Blender Extension called “UCU-Paint by ucupumar” for some time.

This amazing add-on allows me to work directly in Blender. In the background, this extension creates a standard node-based Blender shading tree and can even work with my own shaders or external textures for a PBR workflow.

This extension can be easily installed in Blender under „Preference → Get Extensions“.

https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/ucupaint/?utm_source=blender-4.5.7-lts

Here are some of the features:

• Stack images, vertex attributes, generated textures, or many other types into layers and masks.
• All Ucupaint nodes are contained inside a single node group and can be connected to any other nodes.
• Channels in Ucupaint are flexible, add or remove them based on your needs.
• You can add modifiers like a color ramp or math operation for quick adjustments.
• Works well with multiple objects using the same material.
• Decal support
• Ability to load images from asset browser or file browser
• UDIM is detected automatically based on UV islands.
• Bake final channel images and easily arrange them so most exporters can read them.
• Dedicated alpha channel for flexible transparency workflow
• Bake AO, multires, other object’s normal, and more.
• You can add drivers or keyframes to most Ucupaint inputs.
• Support realtime displacement and even vector displacement map.
• Preview mode to check your layers or channel colors.
• Pack baked channel results into a single image using a custom bake target (useful for creating ORM texture or DirectX normal).
• And so much more.

If you want to learn more about the features and workflows:

https://www.youtube.com/@ucupumar/videos

Version 2.4.5 was released yesterday, which, in addition to some bug fixes, now offers the option to paint custom Normals directly. A frequently used technique, especially for anime-styled characters.

Have fun painting in Blender

Helge