OK, someone one on the SM Poser forum mentioned being able to "paint" in Blender, but I can't figure out how. I did find a TexDraw option, but where's the "brush"??
Any hints would be greatly appreciated.
OK, never mind. I was looking through my bookmarks and found I had a Blender Intro to Painting Textures, and NOW I remember how to get the Paint Brush.
~shakes head~ I had seen it before, but it was so long ago, silly me forgot where it was.
So, a few things I found out only by doing.
If you have some spare dollars, I recommend
BPainter. I haven't used it, but having worked around it, I can say that it would make things much easier.
If you want to work in Cycles (as I do- makes rendered view work easily), you need to set up materials with relevant textures. If you want layers, you need a Blend node with the "top" (second) layer's alpha channel plugged into the mix input. For example, you can
- Make a new texture for your material zone (say Face, Body, etc.). Set the background to whatever is most convenient. Save the image (Image Editor Window > Image > Save As Image) to a folder somewhere before you start working, and make sure to save it along the way as you work.
- (Optional) Make a second texture to layer on top of the second. Set the background color to whatever is convenient and the alpha to 0.
- Create a regular diffuse material (Diffuse BSDF) with the color set to either your one image texture or a MixRGB node (Color > MixRGB) with the first texture as the first color input, your second texture as the second color input, and your second texture's alpha channel as the input for the MixRGB node's factor ("Fac:") input .
There is, as far as I can tell, no way to set a constant size for a stencil in relation to a model or view. That is to say, if you zoom out, the brush and the stencil stay the same size. It would be so, so much better if it scaled proportionally related to the zoom, but there you go. The best way to work is to maintain a constant zoom and stencil scale as much as possible, so it's probably better to start zoomed in. That said, you can eyeball certain stuff.
Stencils are what you want for projection painting. Masks are what you want for textured painting, like freckles or pores. If you find "alphas," that's where you should use them. You should set masks to non-color color space, and if you want them to work kind of like a Photoshop brush, under Texture Mask: Mask Mapping choose View Plane or Random.
For layers (or just to be careful), when you make the new texture to paint in, you want to set the alpha of the background color to 0.
If you want an erase brush, make a new brush from the TexDraw default, and set its Blend mode to Erase Alpha.
Handpainting is _much_ easier if you start building a palette. The color picker has an eyedropper that you can use.
I'm still not sure how the Clone brush is supposed to work. It seems like it essentially works like the regular brush with Stencil, so I'm not sure of the point. I'll look it into it more and tell you if I find anything that clarifies its use.
One of the nicest things about using Blender's 3D paint, IMHO, is that you don't have to worry about overlapping UV maps as long as they're in different material zones (as they'd need to be). It just automatically has you paint in the last active slot of the materials you're painting on, even if that's not what you have selected. You _can_ give a mesh multiple UV maps in Blender, but you don't have to just to paint on a figure with separate maps for limbs, face, and body.
