Getting Started › Introduction

Introduction

CGpainter is a GPU texture painter for 3D models. You import a mesh, paint physically-based materials onto it directly in 3D, bake mesh maps from the geometry, and export the result as texture images for your game engine or renderer.

What is CGpainter?

It works the way artists expect a modern texturing tool to: a stack of layers and masks per material, procedural generators for instant wear and grime, and a non-destructive workflow that survives resolution changes and undo.

Key concepts

A quick map of the terms you'll meet throughout the docs:

• Texture set — one per material slot on your mesh; holds that material's layers, channels, and baked maps.
• Channel — a PBR output of a set (Base Color, Roughness, Metallic, Normal, …).
• Layer — paint, fill, or folder, stacked top-to-bottom.
• Mask — controls where a layer shows, driven by hand-painting, generators, and filters.
• Bake — mesh maps (Normal, AO, Curvature, …) generated from the geometry, often from a high-poly.

The PBR workflow

Instead of painting a single "diffuse" image, you paint several channels that together describe a physically-based material — colour (Base Color), how shiny it is (Roughness), whether it's metal (Metallic), fine surface detail (Normal), and so on. The renderer combines them so the material looks right under any lighting. See Texture sets & channels.