AUSTIN, TEXAS - MechaPaint 1.8.4 is available now. It paints one model with the surface of another, hands you a library of free professionally photographed materials without asking for an account, and adds a brush whose strokes keep running downhill after you let go, the way thinned paint does on a real model.
MechaPaint is a standalone 3D model painter for Windows and macOS: point it at a model you already own, paint on it directly, and export textures without a conversion dance, a plugin, an account, or a subscription. Development is written down in public every night on the Updates page. This release collects what has landed since 1.8.2.
The Multiverse Brush: any mesh to any mesh
The Multiverse Brush paints with pixels borrowed from somewhere else - a different layer, an image file, or a whole second model loaded alongside yours. Hover where the two overlap and the brush shows you what that other surface wears at that point in space; stroke, and those pixels land on your active layer. No shared topology, triangle count, UV layout or scale is required: a three-million-vertex sculpt transfers onto its own decimated game mesh, onto a sphere, or onto a flat quad standing in for a photograph. The model you borrow from stays read only - it never joins your layers, never appears in your mesh list, and never lands in an export.
The Material Depot: free materials, credit where it is due
MechaPaint could paint metal. It could not give you metal - the answer to "I want rusted iron" was a colour picker and an afternoon. The new Material Depot browses thousands of free CC0 materials from ambientCG and Poly Haven, and one press gives the selected part a complete PBR set: colour, roughness, metalness, normal, ambient occlusion and height, with a tiling control to set the scale. No account, no key, no subscription on either end.
The credit is a record, not a tooltip. Every applied material's author and source are shown in the app, saved into the project file, and written into a credits text file beside any export. The materials are CC0 and require no attribution; MechaPaint writes it anyway, because taking credit for someone else's photography is a bad habit even when it is legal.
The camera brush
Quick Texture is a square cursor that photographs whatever the viewport is rendering under it - one click lifts the scales off a dragon's flank, makes the capture seamlessly tileable, and hands it to the brush. Match Scale then paints it back at life size: the tool knows the real-world size of the patch it photographed, so a six-centimeter capture does not come back as a twenty-five-centimeter pattern. It will photograph anything the viewport renders, at any size, including the backdrop and including nothing.
Paint that behaves like paint
The Streak Brush is a gravity smudge. Hold it and the paint under the brush runs downhill - world down, not screen down, so orbiting the model never changes which way it drips - shedding thin wandering runners that travel well past the brush and slow to a stop, with a momentum setting for how long the run continues after release. Groove Flow joins the Fill tool: click the valley of a panel line and paint flows along the groove and stops at the walls, following it around bends, which is the physical modeller's thinned-paint trick in one click.
The PBR pipeline stops making things up
MechaPaint always read the PBR maps inside a GLB, and then threw them away, invisibly. Now imported metalness, roughness, normal, occlusion and emissive maps become paint channels you can see and edit. A new File Info window lists exactly which textures a file arrived with, answering the question that prompted it: are we importing metal, or making it up? The PBR display gained a proper lighting environment, a reflections dial, a normal strength control, and a studio gradient backdrop, and PBR From Photos is now its own sidebar section.
A hand for the reference model
The reference mesh - the read-only second model the Multiverse Brush borrows from - can now be grabbed. A viewport gizmo moves, rotates and scales it by eye, with full pitch, yaw and roll, so a model exported lying on its face can simply be stood up. Lining two meshes up is a job done by hand, and until now every one of those controls was a typed number in a sidebar.
Grass, swatches, and the rest
The grass card tool now exports a complete engine-ready set: base colour with bleed-proof edges, normal, translucency for backlit blades, packed maps, a wind weight mask, card meshes, and a README naming the exact import settings - with presets for Unity, Unreal and Godot. Autoswatch fills the favorites strip with the model's eight most common colours in one press. WebP joins the import formats, animated files included. 3D Print export writes the whole painted model, colour and all, into a single GLB for a print service. Rebuild UVs (No Transfer) gives a model a fresh UV map and a blank canvas on purpose. And the version number is now stamped, very small and very faint, on the logo's forehead, so a screenshot in a bug report identifies its own build.
Written in public
Every change above was posted on the Updates page as it happened, and most of them began as somebody asking for something in the MechaPaint Discord.
MechaPaint remains a one-time purchase, currently half off. There is no seat server, no cloud round trip, and no month in which the software you paid for stops working.
Availability: MechaPaint 1.8.4 is available now for Windows and macOS at mechapaint.com. A free version runs the full application with watermarked exports; buying unlocks watermark-free output.