I have a new COMPLETELY FREE tool coming your way for UE5 called Texture Paint Champ. Check out the showcase video below.
Texture Paint Champ is an in-editor painting tool for UE5 that allows you to paint directly onto a static mesh to update your material’s textures without needing to export to other programs like substance painter, Quixel Mixer etc. This makes it perfect for easily adding dirt, wear and tear, recoloring parts of your object, baking decals/graphics into the texture etc.
****** IMPORTANT NOTE *******
I’m looking for a few volunteers to test out Texture Paint Champ before I make it available to everyone to ensure it’s as bug free as possible. If you’d be interested in being one of the first to try this out and report back with any bugs/issues, please drop me a comment. If you don’t want to test but you’d like to be notified when it’s publicly available then feel free to subscribe to my youtube channel, add a comment here or follow this thread.
Why did I build this? Great tools like substance painter are expensive. Quixel Mixer is free and great in some ways, but I found a number of things I don’t like about it… It has bugs where it doesn’t paint on some parts of the mesh; it requires a lot of material layers if you want to fine tune details; I find the controls unintuitive; requires import/export from/to Unreal, doesn’t accurately render the material quite the same as the engine. So, while it is very powerful, I decided to build my own tool in-engine to make life a bit easier.
Why will it be free? I love building tools and don’t do any of this for a living. Over 150 developers have downloaded my other free tool (Decal Champ - link available at the bottom) and I find that in itself very rewarding. I’ve benefitted from generous people in the community, so this is my way of giving back.
So, let’s get into the details…
KEY BENEFITS
Paint directly on any static mesh in UE5 (no messing around in other programs)
No additional performance cost as you’re just updating the existing textures
Works with almost any material type
Paint an unlimited amount of textures over your mesh’s material’s textures
30 brushes included. Easy to create and add your own custom brushes
Optional Height Based Painting
Easily view your mesh through various lighting conditions
Auto Mapper to make mapping paint and target textures easy
Error checker to help ensure you set everything up properly
Clean and intuitive UI
Easily move around your mesh with keyboard and mouse (uses Unreal’s Floating Pawn Movement Component)
Save/Load your brush settings
Various quality of life tools like auto rotate brush, built-in color picker/palette
Also works with Channel Packed textures
LIMITATIONS
If your mesh has overlapping UVs, it will paint on all parts of the mesh that overlap that section of the UV map
No undo function as it uses play mode, but it does have a built in eraser so easy to clean up mistakes
SHOWCASE VIDEO
Meanwhile, if you haven’t already, check out my other FREE UE5 tool, Decal Champ, where you can easily create your own procedural custom decals using simple materials (Gumroad)
Lastly a huge thank you to everyone who has helped me either through youtube videos or kindness in this forum. @RecourseDesign A special thanks for your help a couple of Months back with saving Normals!!!
This is a great product! I’ve been looking for a replacement to substance painter for a while - always though it should be built into UE! The icing on the cake is this is a great way to create masks for my meshes to reference hires base textures, replacing the texture atlases in existing meshes - finally!
This is really great, minus a lot of import and export work, you can directly achieve some simple texture effects in UE5, I really want to try it! ! In addition, your decalclamp is also very powerful. I want to help you promote your products on my social platform. Is this possible?
After watching the showcase and reading up on all the features, I can say that this is a wonderful tool that you’re developing. I enjoy the ease of access and the variety the tool offers. I’m thoroughly excited to see the development going forward and the final product! Keep up the awesome work!
Can’t seem to get it to work in UE5.2, I get these errors below when trying to paint. There’s no clear installation instructions in the ReadMe, but I enabled UV hit detection in the Project settings and put the TexturePaintChamp folder in my project and loaded a mesh into the level to try editing.
I’m not able to paint any colors on my test mesh. I get these errors when exiting the TextureCreator Level. Seems like a cool project that Epic should include into UE5!
Any ideas why I can’t left click and paint?
Blueprint Runtime Error: “Accessed None trying to read property BrushPreviewMat”. Node: Set Texture Parameter Value Graph: Param Setup Function: Param Setup Blueprint: TPC_Painter
Blueprint Runtime Error: “Accessed None trying to read property BrushPreviewMat”. Node: Set Scalar Parameter Value Graph: SetBrushScalars Function: Set Brush Scalars Blueprint: TPC_HUD
Blueprint Runtime Error: “Accessed None trying to read property BrushPreviewMat”. Node: Set Scalar Parameter Value Graph: EventGraph Function: Execute Ubergraph TPC HUD Blueprint: TPC_HUD
Also, please make sure you migrated TPC properly by opening the downloaded project and migrating the TPC folder and all it’s content to your new project.
I have material that blend two texture (with texture coords uv0) by mask with another UV (uv1) channel. Preview show brush trail placed in UV0, and drawing show UV1. How to make draw train show in UV1?
And modify example to use middle button to rotate camera and paint mode with static camera.
Hi. I didn’t make switching UVs an option out of the box as I found most materials just use UV0 for their textures, but it shouldn’t be hard to change if you want to use UV1 channel. If you go to TexturePaintChamp->Materials->BrushMaterials you’ll see a handful of materials. You can open these up and change the TexCoord nodes to 1 instead of 0. The brush estimator material is the preview you see of the brush (so where you know where to paint). The materials with proxy in the name are the preview materials when you are adjusting your settings and the other materials are the actual output materials that will be used.
TPC uses the built in first person controls / mouse to move the camera around so you paint what you see. To have the screen static and cam rotation done on middle mouse would require a complete rebuild of TPC. Maybe I’ll update it one day to have this option, but it’s a lot of work so not currently something I’m planning on doing. Quixel Mixer is free and paints via a static view though if you prefer that.
Hi,
I just wanted to check with you @HappyKat100 (since you don’t mention any form of licence etc.). Is it okay for us to modify TPC to better suit our workflows etc. ?
Thanks
I’ve made a start on a basic (diffuse painting only) conversion using the engines’ Scriptable Tools Framework plugin as for my needs/workflow, having to run it through PIE etc. was an issue.
