Image Stamps

The Stamps window turns any image into a brush tip. Control rotation, scale, follow-stroke banking, and jitter, then brush the stamp onto the surface or lay it down as a tiling pattern.

Loading your own images

Load Image... takes PNG, JPG and the other common formats, and it is multi-select, so a folder of brushes comes in as one job. Pick several and the window stays open for the next batch. Pick one and it closes.

Grayscale brushes with no alpha channel

Most brush packs are black-on-white or white-on-black images with no alpha channel at all. MechaPaint reads the shape out of the brightness instead, so those load as real brush tips rather than as gray rectangles.

• It converts automatically when an image has no alpha channel and is effectively grayscale. Both together are the signature of a brush pack, and an ordinary photograph stays a photograph.
• Whether the mark is the dark part or the light part is read from the image's own outer border, because a tip's edge is background by definition. That handles black-on-white and white-on-black packs without asking you which you have.
• Alpha from Luminance in the Stamps window overrides the guess on the selected brush, either way, and uncheck it to get the plain color image back. The original is kept in memory, so it still works after the drive you loaded from is unplugged. Built-in tips and ABR brushes are already masks, so they arrive ready to go.

Rotating a stamp

Shift+scroll over the model turns the loaded stamp 15 degrees a notch. It drives the same Rotation value as the option bar's Rot chip, so tiling fills and mirrored dabs follow it. It works on the plain round brush too, where a short tick on the cursor ring shows which way the stamp's up is pointing, and the tick disappears when the roll is back at zero. Everywhere else, and with no stamp loaded, Shift+scroll still zooms.

Import Photoshop brushes

Import ABR... reads Adobe .abr brush files: sampled tips become grayscale stamps tinted by your brush color, and round-brush parameters (hardness, spacing) become presets.

Tiling patterns

With the Brush Settings Tiling toggle on, a stamp becomes a repeating pattern projected in world space, so wood grain, plating, or fabric wraps the model with no visible UV seam.