Feature Request: UV Paint Layers

InstaMAT Features Requests
1

UV Paint Layers and UV Painted Masks as alternative to Volume based Painting.

Justification

Current painting based on volume is a great idea in case of quickly making many assets. But the downside is that it doesn’t handle multiple strokes well. Making UV Paint Layers as an option would help with speeding up paint-heavy projects and avoiding crashes.

Implementation Details

Volume based painting methods should be preserved, but it would be great to have UV painting methods alongside. Should be applicable to Layers and Masks. In case of using the same texture project for many models: It may be good idea to ask user if he wants to apply UV Paint Layers to a new mesh or not. Or even there can be an option to convert Volume to UV and the other way around.

2

Hello @NollieInwardGameAsse and thank you for your feature request.

Can you provide further information about the painting experience you’ve mentioned here? In what way has the painting engine mishandled multiple strokes? Where have you experienced crashes? Can you provide any examples where the performance has lessened compared to other 3D painting software?

Thanks!

3

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/K36Jq4

I encountered issues when texturing this model. Basically, I painted normal map details (instead of sculpting), scratches and fingerprints.

When testing the software in the past I already know volume based painting is kind of heavy, so I decided to to have my painting layers as separate layering projects (normal, scratches, fingerprints), put them in a graph and then reference in main layering project.

While painting scratches after some time and dozens of strokes in I started getting random freezes and crashes (every 5 minutes basically). At the end of working with smears I encountered the same issues.

Then, I referenced these layering projects in my main layering project and loadings started to get very long, affecting the speed of work pretty hard. So, my solution that worked was I exported rgb masks from said layering projects and referenced the images instead of graphs. It worked prefectly fine, Instamat begin to run smoothly again.

So, to have my painted details clocked in I had to add few extra steps. It took much longer than painting in UV based workflow. And my project did not rely heavily on painting. My PC has a 4070 Ti Super with 16 GB vram, 13600 and 64 gb of RAM, so I can not imagine how painful the same process could be for low end machines. It seems like completing entirely painted projects can be next to impossible.

So that is why having an option to have UV based painting tools could be amazing addition. It would be much more versatile tool for not-node-based-minded artists, stylized art and overall painting.

Volume based approach is great for masking (I really love it), but not to good for moderate or advanced painting. It could be better if you find a way to greatly improve the performance. But, in this case, there is no need to reinvent the wheel and giving artists option to choose between two painting workflows inside one software would be purely awesome.

4

I have more projects coming with similar amount of painted details. I consider using Toolbag 5 for painted masks and then bringing them to InstaMat. But, I do not really want to do it. I have never been a fan of long pipelines. That’s why I love InstaMat, as it has potential to be one place to texture it all.