Ucupaint is a Blender add-on that adds a dedicated layer-based texture-painting workflow to materials used by Eevee and Cycles.
Instead of asking artists to assemble and maintain an increasingly complex shader-node tree by hand, it presents material channels, layers, groups, masks and modifiers through a focused panel in the 3D View or Node Editor. The generated data remains inside the Blender project and participates in Blender’s normal painting, shading, sculpting and baking workflow. It supports current Blender releases while retaining separate packages for much older versions, making it unusually broad in version coverage.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Creates and manages material channels derived from the inputs of the active shader.
- Combines image, colour, vertex-colour and procedural sources within an ordered layer stack.
- Groups layers and applies masks to individual layers or larger parts of the hierarchy.
- Controls each layer channel independently with opacity, blend mode and source settings.
- Applies non-destructive modifiers for colour, value, normal and other channel adjustments.
- Handles bump, tangent-space normal, displacement and vector-displacement painting workflows.
- Supports UDIM images and image atlases for larger or more complex texture sets.
- Bakes complete channels or selected data into images for simpler final materials.
- Includes baking options for curvature, thickness and wireframe data alongside Blender-derived information.
- Provides preview modes for inspecting layers, masks, channels and normal-map data.
- Works from the 3D View or Shader Editor sidebar without becoming a separate application.
- Installs from release archives or Blender’s Extensions platform on Blender 4.2 and later.
- Retains legacy packages for Blender 2.76–2.79 as well as packages for modern releases.
- Receives project updates from within Blender and can switch development branches.
Website: github.com/ucupumar/ucupaint
Support:
Developer: Yusuf Umar
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Ucupaint is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Material and Texture Authoring Tools | |
|---|---|
| Material Maker | Procedural texture authoring with a flexible node workflow |
| Blender | Full 3D creation suite for modelling, rendering, animation and more |
| ArmorPaint | GPU-accelerated 3D painting focused on fast material texturing |
| Ucupaint | Layer-based texture painting that works directly inside Blender |
| Gaffer | Node-based look development and scene tooling for VFX pipelines |
| Laigter | Generates normal, specular and occlusion maps for 2D game artwork |
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