Material Depot

The Material Depot button in the toolbar opens a browser of ready-made PBR materials. Search by name, filter by site, pick a resolution, and put the whole material onto a part of your model in one click, or load it onto the brush and paint with it by hand.

Everything in the window is CC0 1.0, public domain, yours to use in anything, commercial work included. MechaPaint fetches it from ambientCG.com and polyhaven.com, with more archives joining them. There is no account, no key and no charge. What matters is that it puts a believable surface on your model in one click.

Opening the window contacts those two sites. MechaPaint says so in the window the first time you open it each session, rather than letting you find out from a firewall prompt. To stop it making any request at all, uncheck Allow Material Depot in Settings.

Picking a material

• Click a tile to select it. The detail strip names the material, its author, the site it came from, its license, and which maps it carries.
• Resolution offers 1K, 2K and 4K, each with its download size in megabytes beside it, so you can see what you are about to spend before you spend it. Painted maps land on a 1024 or 2048 canvas, so 4K covers everything with room to spare.
• A download shows a progress bar with a Cancel next to it, and the window stays live. You can keep browsing while it runs.
• View on site opens the material's own page at the archive it came from.

Download, then Fill Layer or Use

Until the maps are on your computer there is one button, Download. The moment they land it becomes Fill Layer and a Use button appears beside it. Those are the two answers to the same question, so they sit together:

• Fill Layer gives the selected part the whole material at once. The color arrives as a new layer and roughness, metalness, normal, AO and height arrive as new layers on their own channel stacks, six real layers tied together as one group. Hide the group and the part goes back to bare. One Ctrl+Z removes all of it, color and roughness together.
• Use loads the material onto the brush instead, so every stroke lays down its color, bumps, roughness, metal and occlusion at once, wherever you paint. It is projected at the same tile size Fill Layer uses, so a painted patch and a filled part match exactly.

The last thing you arm wins, so picking a color, a texture, an overlay or the clone stamp puts the material down on its own.

A material brings exactly the channels its author made. Rock arrives with color, roughness, normal, AO and height, and leaves your metalness stack untouched, so nothing gets quietly overwritten with neutral.

Applying the same material twice

The layer is named after the material, and that name is its identity. Fill Layer with a material already on a part rewrites that layer rather than stacking a second copy of it, so trying three roughness settings leaves you with one clean layer. It rewrites per target, so a two-part apply leaves every other part exactly as it was.

Tile size

Apply projects the material onto the surface, so Tile size is a real size in model units rather than a count of repeats across the UVs. Auto picks a size from each part's own dimensions. Touching the slider means you disagree and turns Auto off by itself. Press Auto to hand it back. Drag on the bar for fine values, off it to snap to round sizes.

Materials you already have

Import Folder... takes a material you downloaded from anywhere else. Point it at an unzipped folder of plain PBR images from Fab, Megascans or any other source and MechaPaint works out which file is which map from their names. Nothing is sent anywhere and no account is needed. It reads files already on your computer. You can also drop a folder or a zip straight onto MechaPaint, which unzips it for you.

Credits

MechaPaint keeps a list of every downloaded material a project uses and who made it. The list is shown in the window, saved into the .mpaint project, and written to a _Credits.txt beside your exported textures. The file appears only when a project used downloaded materials, so your export folders stay tidy.

CC0 asks for no attribution. The credits are there because somebody made these and gave them away.

Settings

• Allow Material Depot - On by default. Switch it off and MechaPaint leaves both sites alone, and the window tells you so.
• Apply To Every Visible Part - Off by default. On, Fill Layer covers the whole model instead of the part you selected.
• Write Credits On Export - On by default. Puts the _Credits.txt beside exported textures.
• The downloaded materials on this computer are listed with their total size, and can be cleared from here.

When the network has a bad day

If a download stumbles, the footer tells you exactly why: the connection was missing, the site returned an error, or the file arrived damaged. They are three sentences rather than one "download failed" because each one points you at a different fix.