Blender : Texture Painting vs External Paint Program

I usually create models in Blender, mark a few seams, unwrap, then make my textures with an external paint program. However, a lot of tutorials on Blender are using the Texture Paint feature in Blender and they were creating some high quality textures very quickly. It has some advantages being that you can see the direct result of what you are painting, but you lose some precision and scaling of faces, as well as any features a good paint program might have. You could use it to correct some errors or create markers for when you later create the texture externally.

Do you use Blender's Texture Paint , an external paint program, or both?

 

I use Blenders texture paint.
I've not used any external paint programs yet, because so far, Blenders own works well for my texture painting needs.

A free sculpting software, that I sometimes use for sculpting, that I later found out, does some really cool texture painting, is sculptris.
http://pixologic.com/sculptris/
You can check it out if you like.

 

I've pretty much never been any good painting anything that isn't directly on the model. I'm not an artist anyway, so trying to convert from UV to 3d just makes things worse. I've used Blender's texture painting some, and if you are doing something stylized it works really well, primarily if you don't need more than the diffuse color texture. If you wanted to directly paint other textures(like specular for legacy shaders, rough/smooth for PBR), it would then become a hassle.

That is where Substance Painter kicks in for me. The $20 LIVE subscription is a more than reasonable price especially considering it is pay to own. But the featureset of the software is superb. You paint directly on the model, just like Blender's texture paint...but you have direct access to substances, making things that aren't "stylized" much easier to do. You can also make your own "materials" which could come from just textures(instead of actual substances). And either way you go(or even if you combine them), you paint all textures at once, which for PBR is as good as it gets. There is no hassle with painting the "metal" channel along with smooth/rough and albedo color, and in fact you can directly paint height/normal maps as well, possibly allowing you to skip the whole creation of a hi-poly sculpt then bake it down steps.

 

If you mark your seams and UV Unwrap before painting, doesn't it respect the seams and the UVs you've created? I've not messed with it much so I'm not 100% sure.

+1 for Substance Painter. I also have ZBrush but I only use it for sculpting and ZRemesher. I'm not really an artist either so texturing is extremely difficult for me. Substance Painter makes it pretty easy, although I struggle at times when islands aren't oriented the same direction and it starts painting textures (especially things like wood grains) in the wrong direction, but most of that is my unfamiliarity with all of the tool features.

 

That was my confusion with the layout of some things in Blender is very strange, it doesn't seem to work with your UVs by default unless you click on the UV map from the texture paint window. I've only done about 5 models with Texture Painting now so I'm not that experienced and maybe something I'm missing.

There are still two minor issue with the scaling of faces/the paint brush, but it's more about how the UVs compare to the paint surfaces.
The first one is that by default the paint brush changes depending how far the camera is zoomed/rotated, you can change this with the settings, but it's still not perfect, and I'm not sure when you would ever use that as the default setting.
The second issue is with how I make UVs. If one face is substantially larger than other faces, you can't keep them at exact original scale, some of it has to be crammed to fit into UV layout. This doesn't matter as much if you're painting the texture externally, but if you try to Texture Paint on the model after this, some of it will appear 'stretched' or even pixelated sometimes. You can fix this by making the base UV image very high resolution, but it's still kind of an issue. I'm not anywhere near a pro at texturing so there may be better ways to work around this that I don't know yet.

 

Actually, the part about stretched UVs is kind of a fact of life with this, and you will actually have to deal with it externally as well in some fashion. If you paint with GIMP/Photoshop or some other program on the flat UV map, you will have to remember what is what so your painting isn't too big or small. If you use Painter like I do, it pretty much automatically handles it for you, or you can change material's scaling values on a layer by layer basis to make textures bigger or smaller as you are painting.

The only way to minimize the issue is to try to make the UVs as close to each other as possible as far as poly size. When I make my UVs, I create a test texture(Blender has 2 you can use easily enough), and then as I make my UVs, I pay attention that for the most part, the squares of the test texture aren't warped, and are generally the same size all over the model. It will never be perfect for most models, but if you come close you should be fine.

 

After playing with it for a long time , I now prefer Texture Painting over manually painting on the UV map with an external paint editor. Texture Painting is much faster and creates better results quickly (at least for meshes with a lower number of Tris).

The ability to see exactly what you're painting is invaluable at times. For certain meshes I will 'premake' textures to be painted on models and modify it how I see fit. It doesn't have all the features of an advanced paint program but it's definitely a great tool for a majority of models.