3.0.0

⭐ What's New

So many new things in this release warrant skipping 2.5 and going straight to 3.0.

🔸 Cleaner UI and a base layer

The new UI focuses more on the layer list, so all other panels are hidden under panels or popover buttons by default. A Base Layer is also automatically created to edit the base value of all the channels.

New UI popover buttons

🔸 New Height and Vector Displacement Channel

Originally part of the normal channel, height (previously bump) and vector displacement are now their own channel. This simplifies the implementation a lot and opens many possibilities for further improvements. By default, The height channel output is still used as extra bumps on normal channel, so the way you work with ucupaint is still the same.

The Diplacement Setup toggle is also replaced with Quick Displacement Setup operator. The function is still the same, which is to enable displacement and subdivide the meshes to a certain number of polygons, but since it's now an operator, you can do it multiple times to check whether the number of polygons is already enough for your meshes.

height_channel_demo.mp4

🔸 Unified Preview Mode

Previously, channels and layers had their own preview mode, version 3.0 unifies this into a single preview mode that can be used to preview a channel, a layer, layer alpha, mask, or custom data.

unified_preview_mode_demo.mp4

🔸 Adjustment layer

You can now add an adjustment layer, which is just a layer with the previous layer's data that you can add modifiers to.

adjustment_layer_demo.mp4

🔸 Spherical and Cylindrical decal

New decal types are added: spherical and cylindrical. Contributed by @lsmine0

cylindrical_decal_demo.mp4	spherical_decal_demo.mp4
Cylindrical Decal Demo	Spherical Decal Demo

🔸 Bake Target Refactor

A channel now requires a bake target before it can be baked. This allows you to customize settings such as the name, resolution, and other options independently. Don't worry about creating one manually, as a bake target is automatically generated whenever you create a channel. By default, it uses the settings you specify when you do Bake Ucupaint Node (formerly Bake All Channels).

This new bake target system also makes it possible to just use ORM as your main bake target and also you use color attribute as bake target.

Bake Target popover menu contains all the bake targets and Bake Ucupaint Node button	Using ORM is now an option when you do Quick Ucupaint Node Setup	Color attribute is now available to use when creating new bake target

🔸 New Icon

Ucupaint has a new icon contributed by @trulybeardless

New Icon	New Icon in Blender compact sidebar tabs

🔸 Other changes

• Vector is renamed to Mapping
• Legacy Smoother Bump is now gone, your file will be converted to the new system if you load old files using Ucupaint 3.0

🐞 Bugfixes

• Fix: Cannot do any operations that involve UV Map and opening existing data (Blender 5.3)
• Fix: Cannot open images from material if the image has an empty filepath and the current file also has an image that has no filepath
• Fix: Opening layers/images from the asset library or material will append unnecessary images and node groups
• Fix: Updating a blend file created in pre-Blender 3.4 with baked outside enabled disconnects some of the nodes when Use Baked is disabled.
• Fix: Baked normal result can look off in Blender 2.80 to 2.93
• Fix: Transition bump crease doesn't work if the last mask is disabled
• Fix: In certain cases, channel options are inaccessible when creating a new layer.
• Fix: Critical error when duplicating a layer with whitespace at the end of the name.
• Fix: When the layer tree is missing, there's no way to fix it.
• Fix: Baking multires displacement doesn't produce an image with cubic interpolation

💾 Demo Blend files

Blend files for some of the video demos used for these release notes can be downloaded here.

💻 Compatibilty

Tested and compatible with all Blender versions starting from Blender 2.76 to Blender 5.3.

• For Blender 2.80 to 5.3+, you can download the main zip file (ucupaint-3.0.0.zip).
• For Blender 2.76 to 2.79, you need to download the legacy zip (ucupaint-blender_27x-legacy-3.0.0.zip).

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