So, I have massive issues with texture painting in Unreal 5. I started to encounter those issues in 5.3, I then tried the same workflow in 5.1, with the same result.
To put it in a nutshell:
When I use the mesh painting tool, with the “Textures” option, I encounter massive visual glitches (e.g. the objects I’m painting on turns black) that totally break the functionality of the tool.
I started using the tool assuming that I would be able to edit textures in the editor and the material would evaluate my edits immediately, basically enabling me to interactively paint all aspects of my material that are driven by textures. This actually seems to work with a very simple setup, when I only use a texture e.g. for the base color. As soon as my material setup becomes a little bit more complex, say, when the texture I want to paint is a mask that is used as an alpha input in a lerp node, problems start to surface. In that specific case, the texture often does not appear in the list of editable textures. Sometimes it works though, so that is something I might find a workaround for. The biggest problem I encountered so far, are normal maps. When my material uses a normal map, the texture painting breaks the moment I do a stroke. It looks like this:
The normal map gets deactivated the moment I start to paint into the texture that goes into the base color input of the material. It’s interesting to note that as soon as I use the “commit”-button, the brushstroke is evaluated and the object is displayed correctly. So, the texture IS updated, but not on the fly and in a WYSIWYG fashion.
For reference, the material setup in this case looks like this:
All in all the texture painting feature feels pretty broken to me. Do I have false expectations? Is this feature not designed to enable interactive texture editing with realtime feedback in the viewport? Or am I the only one having this problem?
There actually is very little content on the internet explaining this feature of Unreal Engine. It feels like it’s overlooked by the majority. Everyone seems to go the vertex painting route when it comes to mesh painting. My ultimate goal is to edit multiple texture masks on a complex static mesh (a little planet). Due to the detail on the model and the number of masking channels I need I can’t use vertex color. I used to do the texture painting in Blender but was hoping to accomplish this task in Unreal directly.
Any feedback about my issue - if I’m doing something wrong, have wrong expectations or frankly just anything - would be much appreciated!
-DanieL