I love my photoshop brushes. How can I use them in to directly texture my meshes?

TheDonquixotic

I really like using these photoshop brushes from Kyle's Megapack. http://www.kyletwebster.com/blog/2015/9/10/megapack-cheat-sheets

They're packaged as brush/tool presets in Photoshop. 

I know I can unwrap and texture the flat texture file in photoshop but I like directly painting on the 3D model. 

Is there a way to do this? I currently use Blender (I know it's not as well loved here but I'm just a hobbyist). Blender's brush system is not as robust as Photoshop's and hand replicating each of those brush presets would be a pain in the ass. 

Are there any standalone applications or plugins for blender that would allow me to convert PS tool/brush presets into brushes? Or are there any PS plugins that would allow me to hand paint my textures on a 3D model inside PS using my beloved tool/brush presets?

I tried my hand at Quixel just now, and it's very interesting but it seems to be primarily focused on the PBR and painting normal/specular maps and baking, and I'm really looking to do some handpainted texture type look. 

I also briefly looked at Photoshops "3d view" since I remember that's a feature they've been trying to implement more lately. And it turns out that you can apparently paint on the 3d model directly in photoshop now? If that's true, then why isn't photoshop for texturing more common? Why do all the videos I see showing this feature seem to be kind of crappy? Is this actually a decent way to texture 3D objects using PS brushes or is there something I'm missing? I don't have the extended version of PS right now so I can't try out the 3D features, but if it's possible for me to paint my meshes in PS using my brushes, then I'd consider buying the new CC in order to do that. I'd be curious to hear other people's thought though, on this technique or if there are alternatives I don't know about?

Axi5

Hi Donquixotic!

Photoshop's 3D painting mode is fairly bad because:

• It uses non-standard controls. A minor point but it feels very clunky and hard to navigate compared to other apps.
• It doesn't project brushes correctly. It gets worse when you encounter a hard edge or UV seam.
• It is not very responsive, it's slow to apply paint.

However, it is very convenient for you if you do not wish to migrate your brush options.

Alternatively you try another painting application that allows you to paint on 3D Meshes. Some of them in no particular order are:

• Zbrush - Only painting on Vertices, you'll need to heavily subdivide your mesh then bake this in xNormal, still very popular
• Mari - Fantastic Photoshop-esque painter, is a very powerful 3D paint app, first choice tool for the VFX industry.
• Substance Painter - Another fantastic 3D painter, very popular with lots of tutorials and support. They also primarily support PBR but it's easy to change this.
• 3D Coat - I haven't tried, but version 4.0+ seemed to really improve the texturing work
• Quixel - You already mentioned it but it's completely possible to do stylized textures in it, so maybe just check around a little more

All of the applications I just mentioned support Brush Alpha's and robust options such as spacing or flow that allow you to recreate the brush from Photoshop.

Hope this helps. All the best!

harry1511

Well, PS is really crappy when it comes to texturing in 3D space. Last time I tried, it was slow, and clunky, probably because PS was primarily built with 2D workflow in mind, not 3D. Aside from Quixel, Substance Painter is the only option that you can come close to PS when painting directly on 3D objects. I'd say SP is the choice of 3D texturing artist nowadays. PS is only for 2D and it's good at that, but when it comes to 3D, SP is your go-to tool.

I don't think you can import PS brushes directly to SP, but you can import alpha (that you can capture from your PS brushes), then use it in SP.
BTW, Mari is another 3d painting software, but it is out of the price range of most of us here as individual.

throttlekitty

For Quixel you can use these instructions and things should work well enough, but it's not as straightforward as just using the PS brush. 3D Painting in PS is a poor experience at best for the reasons Axi5 laid out. Quixel makes painting in PS much better, and you can still do stylized just fine, don't let the PBR stuff scare you off.

From everything I've seen 3dcoat is a top choice for handpainted-style texturing, probably followed by Substance Painter. I was curious if 3dcoat could import PS brushes directly (looks like it can) but I also found this tool in that search, which would speed up exporting alphas from an .abr, which is pretty cool and universal.

Though in the end, the brushes themselves don't really matter that much, In any of these apps you can create something that looks more or less like those, and many have presets that fall close to what you see in packs like the one you linked. The only caveat there is specific 'wet' effects like ink or watercolor. Unless your style is really bold with contrasting brushstrokes, most of the finer points of these brushes are going to get a little muddied/blurred/mipmapped into small smudges when viewed in the average 3d scene. The finer differences between Ultimate Pastel, Real Oils Sargent Fat or Natural Feel Hurry won't be so prominent in a typical texture.

TheDonquixotic

Thank you guys!  Man this was so helpful! I'm really encouraged by ya'lls advice. I feel like I've been stumbling around the last couple of days with no real clear way of doing stuff. 

I'm going to look into Mari for fun. I've tried 3D coat a long time ago but I think I'll take another crack at it (I also want to retry it's voxel sculpting. I got into 3D modeling because I was interested in VR, and the best VR sculpting experience right now is Oculus Medium imho and it's voxel based so would be interesting to see how 3D coat handles that stuff. ) I've also been planning on trying out Substance Designer, though like Quixel I was kind of intimidated by the PBR workflow. I want to use PBR stuff in my stylized work, it's obviously really powerful to be able to access separate specular and glossiness maps etc but all the tutorials I've found are so hyper focused on photorealism that it's been hard for me to figure out how to approach this stuff. Though as Throttlekitty pointed out the mipmapping etc is probably going to decrease the differences etc between brushes. 

TheDonquixotic

Hey tried Quixel again tonight and found it easier to use once I had the proper set up. Though prefer Substance Painter's UI better. Found the layer system for Quixel to be kind of confusing. Versus Substance Painter, having the ability have my brush selectively be height, gloss, albedo etc. was super useful. Either way though, it turns out Quixel doesn't let me use my Megapack brushes. Well it does allow the import of brushes (as 3D coat does also) but it doesn't allow for the import of tool/brush presets. I'm sure there's a way to convert tool presets into abr but I'm pretty sure it loses some important settings information in the process (there's a reason why Kyle uses tps instead of abr, because you can log additional settings info into it I believe).