SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS - MechaPaint 2.0.8 is available now. It brings a brush that reshapes the mesh itself, Blender files in and out with your rig untouched, Layer Effects on every layer, one Library for everything you can pick, and a brand new way to start a project from a photograph of a leaf.
MechaPaint is a standalone 3D model painter for Windows and macOS. Open a model you already own, paint on it directly in full PBR, and export for your game engine, your 3D printer or your paint bench.
PolyShave, a brush for your topology
PolyShave thins a model's mesh right where you brush it, a little more with every pass, and builds clean quads as it goes. Grid mode lays a tidy grid of quads that follows the flow of the surface. Quad Flow keeps the direction of quads a model already has. When you finish, PolyShave rebuilds the UVs and bakes the look of the original high detail model back onto the light one.
Quad Everything turns every triangle of a part into quads with one button. On a 54,000 triangle character it now leaves 55 triangles and finishes in a third of a second. For a model that was all quads before it was triangulated, Repair and Lines put the original quads back. Brush over a rough spot, or draw a few guide lines on the surface, and PolyShave pairs the triangles the way the artist first built them. On my test model, one repair stroke restored every original quad.
As far as I know, no other painting app lets you sculpt topology with a brush like this. What matters is that you can take a heavy scan or an AI generated model and make it light enough to use, without leaving the app you paint in.
Wire Reveal and Color Wireframe make the result easy to read. Paint the wireframe onto just the area you care about, or turn on Color Wireframe to see triangles in red, quads in blue and larger polygons in purple at a glance.
Blender files in and out
MechaPaint 2.0.8 opens .blend files from Blender 2.80 through 5.2 directly, with materials, UVs, quads and hidden objects intact, whether or not Blender is installed. BLEND is also an export format now. When a model came from a .blend, MechaPaint starts from the original file and changes only the painted materials, so rigs, lights and cameras stay exactly where the artist left them. USDZ packages from Apple tools and AR libraries open too.
Layer Effects and Film
Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow, Stroke and Color Overlay now work live on any layer, including Tracks, Vines, Decals and Text. The sixth effect, Film, is physically based thin film interference, the soap bubble and oil slick rainbow, set by thickness in nanometers.
One Library for everything
PBR materials, gradients, textures, reference images, stamps, brushes, real world paints and generator presets now live in one searchable Library, with the complete ambientCG and Poly Haven catalogs for nearly 3,000 free PBR materials. Gradients and presets preview on lit spheres, and 84 new sci-fi decals are ready to stamp.
New Factories and a Leaf starter
Rust Factory and Feather Factory build rust and feathers from a page of knobs and can grow them right on the model, following the lines drawn with the Hair Brush. ModularPBR Factory packs any PBR set into a single .mpbr file.
The new Leaf starter takes a photograph of a leaf, traces its outline, sets the shadow aside and keeps the stem. Adjust the outline, press Stamp Leaf, and MechaPaint builds a two sided leaf with optional thickness and a twig shaped like the stem in the photo.
And more
Tracks tile across their width and by fractional amounts, Text Path handles multiple lines, Polytoria gains all ten body types, the brush can paint Metal, Rough or Normal on their own, and 2D mode draws noticeably faster. The full list is in the 2.0.8 patch notes.
Availability: MechaPaint 2.0.8 is available now for Windows and macOS at mechapaint.com. It is a free update for owners within their year of free upgrades. MechaPaint is a one-time purchase, currently half off, and the free version runs the full application with watermarked exports.
I believe MechaPaint's interface is its most important feature. Try it out, and let me know what you think!