Release Material Painter 0.1.6: normal, specular, opacity and emission channels · alla2001/material-painter

Material Painter is free and open source. If it saves you time, a donation on Ko-fi keeps development going.

New in 0.1.6

Layers now paint and fill eight channels instead of four. Turn each one on per layer, like color or roughness.

Opacity: paint and fill transparency, or take it from an image's alpha. It's see-through in the 3D view and the path tracer, and exports as the base color's alpha.
Emission: glowing parts, with bloom in the 3D view.
Normal: put a normal-map image on a fill layer to add surface detail. It works with UV, tri-planar and planar projection, and stacks layer over layer. On export it merges with the baked normal map. A Normal strength slider sets how strong it is. Painting with a brush flattens the normal back out.
Specular: how much non-metals reflect. 0.5 is the usual 4%. It exports as its own map in the Unreal, Blender and separate-PBR presets, and only when you use it.

Drop a material on the model and it lands on the texture set under the cursor. That set lights up while you drag.
Drop a texture on a fill layer's image slot (Color, Roughness, Normal…).
Drop generators and smart materials onto the layer list, right where you want them.

Open a smart material's folder as a live graph in the Material Designer. Each layer shows up as nodes (Layer and Smart Mask), and edits on either side reach the other. Undo works the same either way.
New Value node. Mark node settings with ◇ to show them as material parameters, so one slider steers the whole graph.
Graph nodes can read the model's surface (position, normal, baked maps), so they follow the model in 3D with no seams between UV islands.

Rays search along averaged normals, so the cage stays closed over hard edges.
Rays skip faces they reach from behind (the inside of another part, or the far side of the high poly).
A texel whose ray finds nothing takes the nearest surface instead of staying flat.
Cage brush: paint the cage out where the live preview shows misses, or in where another part bleeds in. Auto-fix fits it for you.

New selection modes: face loop, flat area (up to an angle) and texture set. Select by click, drag, box or lasso.
Fixed: a fill's edge padding could spill onto neighbouring UV islands.

Fixed a crash (GPU out of memory) when opening .spp files with several large texture sets. Each set is now created at its final size straight away. Before, every set was made at the default resolution and then resized. Opening big projects needs about 1.4 GB less GPU memory at its peak.
Opacity, emissive and Painter's painted normal details now come across in the flattened result.

Compact shelf when the panel is narrow: icon categories, smaller search, and no names under small swatches.
Bloom now picks up colored emission (pure red or blue glowed too weakly before). The 3D view's emission strength starts at 2.
MCP server: brush strokes, polygon fills and layer updates accept specular and normal_strength. Fill images accept every channel.

Windows

MaterialPainter-0.1.6-setup.exe: installer with Start menu shortcut and uninstaller.
MaterialPainter-0.1.6-windows-x64.zip: portable. Unpack anywhere and run MaterialPainter.exe.

The Windows builds are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn on first launch: choose More info → Run anyway.

macOS (11 Big Sur or newer, Apple Silicon or Intel)

MaterialPainter-0.1.6-macos-universal.dmg: open it and drag Material Painter into Applications. The app isn't notarized yet, so the first time, right-click it and choose Open, then Open again. After that it starts normally.

Linux (x64, glibc 2.35+: Ubuntu 22.04, Fedora 36, Debian 12 and later)

MaterialPainter-0.1.6-linux-x64.tar.gz: unpack, run ./material-painter, and optionally ./install.sh to add it to your app menu.

Needs a GPU with DirectX 12 (Windows), Vulkan (Linux) or Metal (macOS) support.

Early access: expect rough edges. Questions and bug reports are welcome on Discord or as GitHub issues.