Paint In Motion

Catch warped details, sliding marks, and awkward seams before you take the asset into Unity, Unreal, Roblox, or another game engine for the final animation pass.

The buffalo that started it

A few years back I was briefly commissioned to work on a really exciting project for a museum. They needed a large exhibit that would sit either in VR or in a closed room with a giant projector: a realistic, immersive experience of riding a train through a buffalo stampede.

I did not have a lot of time, so I did what most indie developers do and grabbed every art asset I could find off the asset stores. I also did not have a large budget, so the buffalo I ended up with were low-poly and low-res. Quite nice, honestly, especially for the price. They just were not going to hold up ten feet tall on a projector wall.

So I tried to fix their appearance in Substance Painter. I had spent years in Substance Painter, and I still could not pull it off. In my defense, those years were mostly spaceships and underwater bases, and a buffalo is neither. I ended up in Photoshop instead, grafting random parts of real buffalo photos onto the body and hoping the seams would land somewhere the audience would not look.

The buffalo's UV map did not want to play nice with any of it. And that fight is where part of what would become MechaPaint was born.

The part that actually mattered

Here is the thing about a stampede: nothing in it is standing still. A paint job that looks perfect on a T-posed buffalo can smear, stretch, and tear the moment the legs start driving and the shoulder hump starts rolling. The killer feature, the one I needed and could not have, was being able to paint and then MOVE the character forward a few frames to see exactly how bad the stretching would hit the paint.

That is what Paint In Motion is. Load the animated model, scrub to the frame where the deformation is ugliest, and paint right there. Step forward, step back, paint again. The texture bends and settles in front of you, so you find the warped details and sliding marks while you can still do something about them.

The buffalo took me hours to days back then. Today, in MechaPaint, the same job is seconds to minutes. MechaPaint lets you do that with ease.