What modern texture software can paint/project across multiple materials ( not UDIMs) ?

gnoop

While each of  materials having its own UV  and texel density ?    While keeping  same or synced node pr layering system across all those materials and automated export. 

Eric Chadwick

Good luck finding something that does it all! I don't think you'll find it, but I wish you well.

Eric Chadwick

It would be helpful to see an image of what you're working with, and some idea of what you're trying to achieve.

poopipe

Just use UDIMs - it's what they're for
The only thing you lose is different shaders in your painting app. 

You can set painter up to export with specific naming templates for each tile etc so you aren't stuck with the default UDIM naming 
We're doing this at work currently and it's working a lot better than using separate texturesets

gnoop

An example is repeating tilable road 2kx2k material set  with  narrow 64x2k  painted lines and 512x4k road edges   and a second layer of alternating dirt  road 1kx4k.    But when it came to  crossroad  or  branching  it's unique cut  also non-square mostly  that needs to blend into tilable materials well .   All this having 512x2k  tillable with very big interval  splat macro  to mix dirt and asphalt  +  color /normal /spec macro layer.(another macro layer).    The unique areas have to be slightly bigger texel size in general  in macro layers  because of too many unique  varieties  .    

 Or another example:   A roadside barrier  with tilable  long 4kx512 left/ right  side  textures , narrow top  like 64x4k  both set to be tilable only in U  and unique  start /end parts matching certain area on side of left/ right/top  repeating sides   for seamless appearance.  

   If set UDIM style  Painter wants everything in perfectly square factor  and does ugly  /blurry stretching . my guess even brush dab  stretching probably.   Not sure  what genius decided we would be using only square  textures  and perfectly same texel density  everywhere.    Not in macro layers for sure.   

Blender can paint across different materials with different texel density  on top of base/macro layers setup.   with quite nice brushes   but  it's an ancient , one channel only  way never been upgraded since  v2  and setup nightmare  to bake   and  export  . I wonder what are alternatives?    If any?    

  ps  And I would love some vector style   non-destuctive brushes,  post stroke editable   to paint   tire tracks  , stripe like  details across  tilable and unique parts .

  

Celosia

gnoop said:

Blender can paint across different materials with different texel density  on top of base/macro layers setup.   with quite nice brushes   but  it's an ancient , one channel only  way never been upgraded since  v2  and setup nightmare  to bake   and  export  . I wonder what are alternatives?    If any?   

  

The ucupaint add-on lets you paint across multiple channels in Blender and also makes baking less of a pain. It simply creates all node setups necessary to mask and mix things under the hood and organizes textures and color fills in a layers-style panel, with quick access to baking per layer, channel or everything without having to use Blender's contrived native workflow. You can paint across different materials if you setup the layers to use the same images. No help in exporting though, and all other annoying quirks of the texture painting system remain.

gnoop

Thanks Celosia.   I assume  you still only can  paint on a single image target  only?  So each brush stroke  goes to only albedo , or only bump , or only roughness channel   and  using silent stroke recording  to paint on other images as well  has a same issue Photoshop  has  when it records strokes  but dosen't record brush dab spacing and jitter?        Also I assume  it works on a single  material or can create a synced layers/ node setup on multi materials ?    

 

Wonder why nobody  has modified  Blender painting part  yet  with multi channel G buffer.  As far as I heard modern videcards support up to 8 rgba imags.    Something  requiring  C++ codding my guess  .  Chat GPT happily suggested me to do so    but my experience with it tells me it would  a nightmare.   

Celosia

As far as I know it's not possible to paint multiple images at once. It seems to be a limitation of Blender, and while I found a couple of very old add-ons that seem to have been maybe able to paint across images they fell out of support a long time ago so I can't even confirm if whether someone found a way or not. The ucupaint dev is very responsive; if it's possible, requesting it would be worth a shot.

The best but still contrived and limited workaround for ucu today is to treat images as instances. You can have as many layers using the same images as you wish, making it possible to create things like a roughness group using an image you're also using for the color channel but with different masks and adjustments, added and subtracted to other images inside the group, etc.

Overhauling the painting system is in Blender's roadmap. The bad news for anyone looking forward it is that it seems sculpting will be done first, and there's a lot to fix on this side, so unless a dev with love for texturing adopts the painting system it'll probably be years before they get to painting. 

poopipe

@gnoop fair points - sticking to the UDIM paradigm sort of forces some of that . It's a  shame really cos there's no real technical reason for it

iam717

Eric Chadwick said:

Good luck finding something that does it all! I don't think you'll find it, but I wish you well.

Not adding much to the thread sry, though wanted to mention this, in-case someone behind the scene actually did or does this. (pst, pm me. )

Wouldn't that be the thing, in my naivety (or just not being very informed) i thought a coder C++ (+) person could "reverse engineer things (being illegal sure but for production purposes amazing and very helpful) could "extract" codes for functions of each application and make their own "viewport/engine", using all the best of all the applications.   thanks celosia, by posting that link i remembered i should get a krita update.

On topic: i tried to udim i think once, might have to force myself eventually, guess i'd need a video or updated how to udim, wiki maybe?

poopipe

that's not really how it works - what you're suggesting is more difficult than implementing it from scratch and is expressly forbidden by the EULA in most cases. 

gnoop isn't asking for anything particularly difficult or new here, the problems have all been solved and solutions are  well understood. it's just the case that nobody identified this as a featureset they should build.  I'm 99% sure someone said 'giv UDIM support, everyone wants', walked off and left programmers to make UDIM support

This is usually what you get when you listen to marketing/artists without questioning the motivation behind their requests and identifying what it is they actually want from a feature.