Updates

August 10 - 12, 2026

The Bump Brush, a brush you draw yourself, and six more image formats

New tools

• The Bump Brush. A brush that writes to the height map and nothing else, so you can carve and raise real surface detail without touching your color. Strokes now have a cross-section, Round, Chisel, Soft or Peak, instead of a flat floor with a hard edge, and it can write to the normal map too.
• The Brush Builder. Draw a shape and it is already the brush. No exporting a PNG, no round trip through another app. The Brushes window also got a "None" tile, so picking a brush is no longer one way. Brush docs
• ZBrush-style brush gradients. Falloff you can shape, on any brush.
• Paint Hidden now answers in three states. White, gray and black: fully visible, partly buried, completely buried. It used to test one point per polygon and call the whole face, which made a half-sunk part a coin toss. Mesh diagnostics

Import and export

• Six new image formats. TGA, BMP, HDR, TIFF, EXR and PSD now load anywhere MechaPaint takes an image, through one shared decoder. PSD reads the merged composite; HDR and EXR come in tone mapped, as viewable images rather than lighting.
• Export settings moved out of the dialog. The format, Composite PNG, PBR or Roblox PBR, is now a property of your project in the Meshes sidebar, not a question asked on every press. Export docs
• Export stops asking twice. The first press picks a destination, every press after that overwrites the same set silently, with Export / Export As... on the caret exactly like Save.
• The export button lights up when your files are out of date and goes dim when they are current. Dim never means disabled, a dim press still exports in full.
• Hidden layers are never exported. A PNG now shows what the model shows. Your project file still keeps every layer.
• LightWave users get sensible folders. MechaPaint recognizes a content directory and opens image dialogs in Images, saves projects into Scenes, and points exports at where the LWO's textures actually are.

Painting

• Painting at low opacity makes the mesh actually see-through. Transparency now lives outside the layer stack, so alpha survives having an opaque layer underneath it. Layers
• A hidden layer can no longer be the paint target, so a stroke can never land somewhere you cannot see it. Hiding a layer also lights the Save button.
• Layers "..." now has Clear, which empties a layer without deleting it. Name, blend mode, opacity and stack position all survive.
• Undo stopped leaving a brush dab behind. Ctrl+Z could paint the hover preview onto the layer for real. Fixed. Undo and redo
• Depth and Relief do something again. The bump normal was always saturated, so both sliders were quietly doing nothing.

Interface

• The left tool dock scrolls on a short window. Drag it up and down, or use the wheel. Nothing drags when everything already fits.
• File shortcuts. Ctrl/Cmd + S, Shift+S for Save As, plus O, N and E. Projects
• The mesh picker's arrows stay put. They used to move every time the mesh name changed length, which meant cycling a 17-mesh model moved the button you were clicking.
• The key light marker turns with the light instead of facing you no matter where the light is, and it moves out of the way of the color picker.
• No more white OS menus. The Export As list, the bake source picker and the Ideal Texels bar all wear MechaPaint's dark theme now instead of Unity's light one.
• An export dialog no longer blanks your texture to get in front of itself, which looked exactly like losing your work at the moment you were deciding whether to save it.
• The Diagnostic Paint window got a real titlebar and a real resize corner, and Paint Issues now paints only the colors its own key explains. Undo takes the markings down with it.