Pigment

In one line#

Paint textures directly on the model, orbiting to reach every surface, with a non-destructive layer stack per PBR channel.

The layout#

What you do here#

Get a model in#

Import a mesh, or send one from Retopo: a retopologised, UV-unwrapped mesh is what Pigment wants, because a texture needs somewhere to land. A raw sculpt can be painted, but its UVs will fight you.

Paint into channels#

The channel is the thing to keep an eye on; the status bar always shows it. Base colour, roughness, metallic, normal, height, AO and emissive are separate targets, and the same brush stroke goes into whichever one is active.

The Material / channel selector on the toolbar switches between seeing the shaded material and seeing one channel raw. Judge roughness in the raw view; judge the result in the material view.

The brush#

Presets across the top of the brush panel, with Save brush for your own. Then: tip shape (round, square, or a custom alpha), size, opacity, hardness, flow and spacing, a blend mode, and pressure sensitivity assignable independently to size, opacity, hardness and flow.

GPU painting is a switch, and it is on by default; it is what makes a large brush on a 4K texture feel immediate.

Layers#

A stack like Inkwell's, but per material: blend modes, opacity, reordering, duplicating, merging, locking and clearing. On top of that:

• Gen Mask, a generated mask: curvature, ambient occlusion, position, thickness. This is how you get wear on edges and dirt in crevices without painting either.
• Gradient: a gradient fill layer.
• Mask: a hand-painted mask.
• Channels: restrict a layer to the channels it should affect.

Generators in the menu bar produce whole effects: the procedural half of texturing, next to the hand-painted half.

UDIM#

The tile row at the top of the right panel: 1001, 1002, 1011, 1012 and so on. Each tile is a texture set of its own, which is how a character gets 4K on the face without 4K on the boots.

Symmetry, UV and 2D#

X / Y / Z symmetry on the tool rail. UV shows the unwrap; 2D paints in the texture space rather than on the model. Some seams are easier to fix in 2D than by rotating the model.

Lighting#

The HDRI environment is a view setting, not a texture. Change it while judging a material: a metal that reads well under one HDRI can look wrong under another, and that is worth knowing before it reaches the Engine.

The right panel, ten tabs#

The Baker#

Baking is what turns geometry into texture, and it is the panel that makes a game-ready asset possible: bake ambient occlusion, curvature, normal, position and thickness from a high-poly mesh onto a low-poly one, with a cage to control the projection.

Those baked maps are what the generated masks in the layer stack read. Wear on edges is curvature; dirt in crevices is ambient occlusion. Bake first, and the procedural half of texturing starts working.

Unwrapping, and the warning that matters#

Pigment can unwrap a model that arrives without UVs, and it reports what it did: the method, and how many islands came out. When part of the mesh defeats the solver it says so, "N island(s) fell back to a flat projection", rather than pretending the result is uniform.

Two messages are worth reading in full:

⚠️ "Unwrapping redistributes the UVs, so everything already painted will land somewhere else on the model. This cannot be undone by repainting. Continue?" Unwrap before you paint. This is the one irreversible order-of-operations mistake in the module, and the dialog exists because it is easy to make.

"Box-projected UVs applied. This is a stopgap: oblique faces stretch and opposite faces overlap." Box projection gets you painting in seconds on a mesh with no UVs at all. It is not a substitute for an unwrap, and the panel refuses to imply otherwise.

If the unwrap fails outright, the reason is named: no faces, or geometry the solver cannot flatten.

Masks and adjustments#

A mask on a layer is a paintable channel of its own: paint reveals, the eraser hides, and Alt-click removes the mask entirely. Once a mask exists it can be blurred, feathered, pushed through levels, imported from an image or exported as one, which is how a mask made in Inkwell gets used here.

Adjustment layers cover the usual set, brightness/contrast, levels, exposure, vibrance, hue/saturation, posterize, threshold, shadows/highlights, and an adjustment with nothing to configure says "this adjustment has no settings" instead of showing an empty panel.

The viewport effects#

Eight, and they are for judging the paint, not for delivering an image: anti-aliasing, bloom (with its own weight), ambient occlusion, vignette, film grain, sharpen, depth of field and chromatic aberration.

They are a preview, not part of the texture: what leaves Pigment is the channel maps. Turn them on to see whether the material reads under lighting; turn them off to judge the albedo.

Files it reads and writes#

Export textures and Export as GLB are also in the command palette.

Sending work to other studios#

Produces a textured mesh. Accepts meshes from Sculpt and Retopo, textured meshes, and PBR material sets from Matter.

A Matter material arrives with its channels mapped to the right slots, so it can be dropped onto a layer and then masked, rather than reassembled from seven loose files.

Downstream: Render to light it, or Engine to use it.

Working with someone else#

Pigment syncs operation by operation, including 3D brush strokes: fills, every layer operation, channel changes, texture resolution, masks, materials, HDRI, view mode, symmetry and stencils.

Limits and common snags#

• Painting into the wrong channel is the most common mistake in the studio. The status bar tells you which one is active.
• A mesh with no UVs cannot be textured properly. Unwrap in Retopo first.
• Texture resolution costs memory, per UDIM tile. Four 4K tiles is not the same as one.
• Seams show at the UV boundary. Painting across a seam in 3D helps; the 2D view is where you finish the job.