Ucupaint
Layer based painting for Eevee and Cycles.
Ucupaint is a Blender addon to manage texture layers for the Eevee and Cycles renderers. Already in development for years, Ucupaint provides a lot of easy-to-use features while also being able to fit into your usual shader nodes workflow.
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.
- Easily set up transparency by enabling alpha channel in a single click.
- 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.
Location
- View 3D > Sidebar > Ucupaint
- Shader Editor > Sidebar > Ucupaint
Documentation
Please read the wiki to see the documentation and demo. It's not 100% complete yet, but it still can help you get started. To contribute to the wiki, you can go to the wiki repo.
Compatibility
Ucupaint is compatible with older Blender versions, starting from Blender 2.76. But for Blender versions earlier than 4.2, it's better to use the GitHub version to ensure access to the auto-update feature.
Sponsor
If you find the addon useful, you can sponsor the addon development here
What's New
2.3.0 May 24th, 2025
New Features
- Rebake all baked layers and masks
Paste layer(s)has an option to rebake baked images- New layer and mask type, realtime Ambient Occlusion
- Realtime
Edge detectcan now also be used as a layer - Realtime
Edge Detect,AO, andFake lightinglayers are now bakeable as an image - New Dither option (for bake channels) to avoid banding color
- New OSL option (for bake channels) to avoid
Out of SVM stackerror when the material is too complex - Fill selected geometry option when ColorID or vertex color is added in edit mode
- Copy & Paste custom bake target
Open Images from Materialnow will check the node connection by default rather than checking the image namesPaste layernow works with ucupaint node with a different channels list
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| Youtube video demo of realtime AO and rebake all layers/masks |
| Comparison of baked channel result with dithering on and off |
Changes
- New float image will use
Premultiplied alphaby default since it has better alpha handling. - Enabling displacement setup will use
Displacement and Bumpmode rather thanDisplacement Only
| Byte image with straight alpha has outline artifacts compared to float image with premultiplied alpha |
UI Update
- All baked channel data is now displayed at the same time
- A bake button is added for some realtime
AO/Edge Detect/Fake Lightinglayer/mask for easier access - Most Ucupaint operators now can be assigned to a custom shortcut key.
- Tree name can now be customized from the quick node setup popup
Removebutton is added for baked layer/maskOpen Image in Exploreris added to the image layer/mask/channel source dropdown (263)Toggle Eraserbutton will be switched to redDisable Eraserbutton when the active brush is an eraser.
| New baked channels UI |
Bugfixes
- Fix: Misaligned internal nodes location on Blender 4.4+
- Fix: Replacing a mask type to
Backfacewill create unnecessary nodes - Fix: Baking with denoise enabled can make the bake result even noisier in some cases
- Fix: Group panel shows unused properties
- Fix:
Open Image as channel sourcealways uses an absolute path - Fix:
Duplicate layerwon't duplicate its vertex color data - Fix:
Open image to layer channel sourcesometimes uses incorrect colorspace - Fix:
Bake All Channelscausesan error when there's a normal enabled layer with a fake lighting mask - Fix: Duplicate/Paste multiple layers did not recognize multi-user images and decal objects
- Fix: Bake
Bevel Normalsometimes produces wrong result - Fix: Float image uses wrong gamma color
- Fix: Wrong base color of float baked normal
- Fix: Bake other object channels with SSAA enabled produce wrong results on Blender 4.5
This is just insane how this is free.