Hi, I'm planning on painting a photo-based texture for a Poser figure in Blender 2.9 and looking for some advice.

The stencil feature looks pretty neat, so I'll probably use that for most of the work. A problem I'm currently having is the the figure currently has a few too many material zones. Blender doesn't seem to let me paint onto more than one at the same time. Or maybe I just haven't found the right settings yet.

If all else fails I could probably just use a single skin zone for everything except nails, inner mouth bits and eyes. But then I'd either have to reorganize the UVs or make sure UDIMs work correctly in both Blender and Poser.

Unfortunately, this is not so easy to do.

I help myself by setting up a temporary material that includes all material zones covered by an image.

Procedure: In edit mode select all UV vertices you want to combine. Switch to Texturepaint and set up a new material. The selected vertices are automatically assigned to this material.

Paint away :)

Save the textures. Delete temporary material. Done.

Hello odf

I have not yet found any tutorials to address what you are trying to do or with a solid work flow. in what file format did you import your Poser figure into Blender? I have found some Blender features work better or become available dependent on the file format you exporte3d from Poser and then into Blender. If you are modifying texture maps I think Collada and FBX formats seem to work best as the Obj you usually have to manually map the textures to the obj which can be a bit time consuming. But if you are going to create completely new textures then the obj file format would work just fine since you can paint texture as layers if not mistaken. Hopefully someone with a bit more know how on texture painting in Blender chimes in this is one topic that is not one of my strongest skills in Blender.

A bit more detailed:

It does not matter if you select vertices or UV vertices. So the selection can also be done in "Modeling" mode. And the selection does not have to be very precise. It is only important that all required vertices are covered. Nevertheless, one should select as precisely as possible. The best way to do this is to have vertex groups in the model that you can select.

After creating the new material (which is then empty), select the main material that covers the imagemap in question (preferably in "Shading" mode). Copy this material into the newly created material.

Back to "Texture Paint". Now make sure that the correct image is selected. Then you can start painting.

If you have to paint the same figure more than once (i.e. combine several different material zones), it is worth making a copy of the blend file. You will only need it to create the textures. This also has the advantage that you can remove material properties (such as specular) that tend to interfere when painting textures.

Oh yes: Save more often is the order of the day. It's annoying when Blender hangs after hours of painting or something else ruins all the work.

A helpful free AddOn while working with materials: Material Library VX (just activate it in your setup).

A nice tool (Open Source) is Armor Paint. Not to be compared with Substance Painter or similar, but for the first steps it is not bad at all.

https://armorpaint.org

adp001 posted at 9:57AM Wed, 08 September 2021 - #4426939

A helpful free AddOn while working with materials: Material Library VX (just activate it in your setup).

I wasn't aware this plugin existed in the included add-ons. I even found it in my Blender 2.79 version, as well as the newer 2.93 version. I'll have to try this out.

Miss B posted at 10:24AM Wed, 08 September 2021 - #4426953

I wasn't aware this plugin existed in the included add-ons. I even found it in my Blender 2.79 version, as well as the newer 2.93 version. I'll have to try this out.

:)

Don't forget to add a fake-user to your materials. Materials are stored in a blend file and not in a "real" database. Materials in a blend file are deleted if they are not actively used and thus have no "user".

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/materials/material_library.html

adp001 posted at 11:30AM Wed, 08 September 2021 - #4426957

Miss B posted at 10:24AM Wed, 08 September 2021 - #4426953

I wasn't aware this plugin existed in the included add-ons. I even found it in my Blender 2.79 version, as well as the newer 2.93 version. I'll have to try this out.

:)

Don't forget to add a fake-user to your materials. Materials are stored in a blend file and not in a "real" database. Materials in a blend file are deleted if they are not actively used and thus have no "user".

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/materials/material_library.html

Ahhh, thanks for that info. Good to know.

Miss B posted at 11:36AM Wed, 08 September 2021 - #4426969

adp001 posted at 11:30AM Wed, 08 September 2021 - #4426957

Miss B posted at 10:24AM Wed, 08 September 2021 - #4426953

I wasn't aware this plugin existed in the included add-ons. I even found it in my Blender 2.79 version, as well as the newer 2.93 version. I'll have to try this out.

:)

Don't forget to add a fake-user to your materials. Materials are stored in a blend file and not in a "real" database. Materials in a blend file are deleted if they are not actively used and thus have no "user".

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/materials/material_library.html

Ahhh, thanks for that info. Good to know. I just bookmarked that link for future reference.

Thanks for all the tips, adp001! I'd been thinking along the same lines with the custom material for texturing, but thought I might just be missing something. Also, I'd been wondering what that "fake user" option was useful for. Now I know.

Also I guess it's a bit of relief to know I'm not the only person that Blender crashes on. Poser does, too, but very rarely these days.

adp001 posted at 8:59PM Wed, 08 September 2021 - #4426941

A nice tool (Open Source) is Armor Paint. Not to be compared with Substance Painter or similar, but for the first steps it is not bad at all.

https://armorpaint.org

Just the other day I just saw a video comparing that tool and Quixel Mixer with Substance. Might give it a try.

So, I'm starting to get somewhere. In order to create a new material, I had to remove all the usemtl lines from the OBJ file. Maybe there's some other way, but I couldn't figure it out. Also, hiding bits like lashes, eyeballs and brow overlays in edit mode did not hide it in texture paint mode, so I went ahead and removed those faces. I figure whatever modification of the original geometry lets me paint the texture in the way I want is fair game for now. Still, if there's an easy way to hide things in texture paint mode, let me know.

My first paint results obviously don't look like much, but that's just a matter of practice. I might have switch from mouse to tablet at some point to get a bit more control.

odf posted at 10:52AM Thu, 09 September 2021 - #4427010

So, I'm starting to get somewhere. In order to create a new material, I had to remove all the usemtl lines from the OBJ file.

That's easy.

Right click and select "delete" for the upper part, or just click the minus icon on the lower part to delete a material. The lower part apears in "Shading" Mode, the upper part is always there.

odf posted at 12:35PM Thu, 09 September 2021 - #4427010

Also, hiding bits like lashes, eyeballs and brow overlays in edit mode did not hide it in texture paint mode, so I went ahead and removed those faces.

That's indeed a problem. I made morphs to hide those bits. So I can restore/hide them anytime and check if they play well and look good with the new modifications.

Another possibility is to detach such parts from the mesh and manage them as separate objects. Then you can easily switch them on/off. As long as you don't have to rely on the vertex order, this is the best way.

Separating meshes and putting them back together is super easy with Blender.

adp001 posted at 10:59PM Thu, 09 September 2021 - #4427035

Another possibility is to detach such parts from the mesh and manage them as separate objects. Then you can easily switch them on/off. As long as you don't have to rely on the vertex order, this is the best way.

Separating meshes and putting them back together is super easy with Blender.

Yep, that sounds like a good option to me.

adp001 posted at 11:01PM Thu, 09 September 2021 - #4427028

Right click and select "delete" for the upper part, or just click the minus icon on the lower part to delete a material. The lower part apears in "Shading" Mode, the upper part is always there.

Oh, I realize deleting materials from within Blender is easy. It's just that it's even easier to do from the command line when I have a lot of them and want to get rid of the whole lot.