Lighting Preview
Check your paint under adjustable key and ambient light, with ambient occlusion baked live.
The Light tool turns on lighting controls in the Lighting sidebar: ambient light, key light color and direction, key-light shadows, and ambient occlusion. Everything updates live so you can judge your paint under real lighting conditions as you work.
The Edge Angle map
Edge Angle, in the same Lighting sidebar, paints the shape of the model onto the albedo as false color, so you can see where a corner is sharp and where a surface is exposed before you start laying wear. The angle is measured through the air outside the model, which means the number reads as exposure and the map reads the way a wear artist thinks.
- 90 degrees, deep blue - a tight valley, the deepest point of a fold.
- 180 degrees, green - flat surface.
- 270 degrees, yellow - the outer edge of a cube.
- 360 degrees, red - a knife thin protruding spike.
Deadband sets how sharp an edge has to be before it draws, Width sets the thickness of the line, Strength sets how strongly the color lands, and Fill flat background lays green under everything so the lines read against a known base. The legend takes its swatches from the same color table the bake uses, so what you see in the panel is what lands on the model. Each submesh bakes as a single undo step.
Exposure dots
Turn on Vertex dots and every vertex gets a disc colored by how much open sky it can see, measured as the true exterior solid angle around that point. That is what makes it an exposure map rather than an edge map: a corner tucked inside four walls reads darker than a three wall inner corner, and a cube's outer corner reads brighter than the edges that meet there, because it really is more exposed. Flat edges from triangulation contribute exactly nothing, so two versions of the same shape cut into triangles differently give you the same dots, and a vertex split across a UV seam gets one identical dot on both islands. Dot size is on the panel.
