MechaPaint / Every Feature
EVERY FEATUREThe whole toolbox, in one list
Wondering if MechaPaint does the one thing you need? Here is everything it does, grouped by job. Skim the section that matches your problem and find the tool for it.
Putting paint on the surface
The core hands-on tools for laying color, strokes, and imagery directly onto the 3D model.
Brush
The core freehand brush, pressure-sensitive, with smooth tapered strokes that finish in a clean point, response curves and smoothing.
Eraser
Erase paint on the active layer with the same smooth stroke engine as the brush, and a live footprint preview.
Line Tool
Draw straight lines that wrap the surface, with full pressure and gradient support.
Eyedropper
Pick any color off the model, even mid-stroke, with a right-tap, and a before-and-after color preview.
Image Stamps
Paint with image tips, rotation, follow-stroke, and jitter. Photoshop .abr brush sets import directly, and any PNG or JPEG can become a brush.
Text on the Surface
Lay down text on the model using any font installed on your machine, or the stencil and military fonts built in. Text Path bends your words along a curve of dots and keeps them editable.
Paint the material, not just the color
Six channels on every model, painted together or one at a time, all in the same window you paint color in.
Six Painted Channels
Base color, normal, metallic, roughness, ambient occlusion and height, each with its own layer stack, shown live on the model as you paint.
Channel Chips
Chips along the viewport pick which channels a stroke writes. Ctrl+click one to paint that channel alone, so you can glaze color over a surface and keep its relief.
Paint With A Material
Arm a PBR material and it goes on the brush. Every channel lands in register under one stroke, so a metal plate looks like metal the moment you paint it.
PBR Materials Library
Browse ambientCG, Poly Haven and my own MechaPaint materials right in the app, fill a layer or paint with one, and write the credits out with your export.
Bump And Edge Normal
Raise or carve height and normal with the brush, ZBrush style. Edge Normal paints a chamfer into the normal map at the width you set in real units.
Reveal Metal
The Wear brush chips paint off the edges and writes color, metallic and roughness together, so the bare metal underneath shines like bare metal.
Photo To Material
PhotoPBR turns one photograph into all six channels, with de-lighting and tiling repair, on a new layer ready to paint with.
Moisture And Space Metal
Moisture gives a surface the wet look. Space Metal gives starship hulls their sheen, glint and rim light, with seven presets and an export kit for Blender, Unreal, Unity and LightWave.
The details that make a machine look built
Panel lines, lightening cuts, bolts, vents and stripes, placed on the surface and written into the normal and height maps.
Mecha Line
Click a path across a plate and it becomes scribed panel linework. Heavy and thin lines mix in one bundle, with sharp corners, step cuts, splits and swells.
Panel Rules
Mecha Line follows a real panel line style guide. Every line keeps a direction, the busy detail gathers in one focus zone, and the step cuts have a shape you choose.
Skeleton
Select some faces, press Generate, and a lightened frame of bars and pockets is cut into the normal and height maps. Set the bar width, pocket depth, chamfer and color.
PBR Decals
Bolts, vents and hatches with every map in register. Drag one onto the model, rotate it, scale it, and save your own paint as a new decal.
Decals That Wrap
A decal folds over an edge or walks all the way around a part. Turn on 9-slice and it stretches as far as you like with crisp corners.
Track
A PBR strip brush bent along a path of dots, with bezier handles. Racing stripes, weld beads, belts and rims follow every bump.
Beveled Panels
Select an area and press Shift+Delete to raise or sink it as a beveled panel in the height and normal maps.
Stencil Fonts
Text decals and Text Paths come with stencil and military fonts built in, for NO STEP, unit numbers and hull markings.
Ten years of use, in one drag
Brushes and bakes that age a model the way real objects age, from the outside in.
Sandpaper
Wears the paint away the way real paint goes: corners first, then edges, then flats. Chipping breaks the edge into flakes, and Fine Line wears it down to a hairline.
Dirt And Dirt All
Brush grime into the crevices, or cover the whole model in one click. It can read the part's normal map too, so painted panel lines collect dirt.
Smart Wear, Grime, Edge Wear
Bakers that age the whole model, each on its own layer, with region windows that bake only the part you choose.
Generator Window
See curvature, occlusion and thickness right on the model, and run mask generators such as Ground Dirt, Dripping Rust and Fiber Glass Edge Wear as preview layers.
Streak
A gravity smudge that pulls paint downhill into drips, for rust runs and rain stains.
Color Breakup
A painterly brush option. Every dab shifts a little in hue and value, warm in the lights and cool in the darks, for the hand-painted look.
Covering ground fast
Fill whole pieces, screen regions, or connected geometry in a click instead of a thousand strokes.
Paint Bucket
One click fills a whole connected piece, solid color or a triplanar pattern.
Poly Fill
Flood-fill triangles directly under the brush sphere.
Region Fill
Lasso a screen area, marquee, polygon, circle, or rectangle, and fill the faces inside it.
Live Regions
Save a Region Fill to a library and re-open it later with its camera restored.
Select Connected
Click a piece to select every polygon joined through a shared edge, then paint only there.
Two-Color Gradients
Paint a start-to-end gradient with the bucket, line, and brush, linear or radial.
Paint once, get it twice
Mirror work across the model, copy detail from place to place, and keep strokes from bleeding through.
Symmetry
Paint one side, watch both update, true mirrored reflection across X or Z.
Mirror Brush
Brush the mirrored albedo from the other side of the symmetry plane, only where you want it.
Whole-Layer Symmetrize
Mirror an entire layer in one move to fix asymmetric damage.
Clone Stamp
Sample detail anywhere on the mesh and paint it anywhere else, in 3D.
Ghost Tool
Hide faces you don't want to paint through, so strokes never bleed onto the far side.
Working from an image
Bring outside artwork in as reference, project it onto the mesh, or lift just the detail you want.
Reference Images
Drop any image in as a floating reference window, by paste, drag, or import.
Projection Painting
Project a reference image straight onto the mesh from the current view.
Extract Details
Transfer only the dark detail, screws, seams, panel lines, from one image onto your paint, keeping its color.
Non-destructive, like Photoshop
A full layer stack per submesh, deep undo history, and a color picker with saveable favorites.
Layers
A full non-destructive layer stack per submesh: hide, fill, merge, recolor, and import into any layer.
Undo & Redo
A Photoshop-style history with a hard floor, it can never erase your imported base texture.
Color, Swatches & Favorites
A viewport color picker with saveable favorites, solid colors and whole gradients.
When the map is the problem
Fix seams, rebuild broken unwraps, combine loose sub-meshes, and watch it all on the flat map.
Seam Fix
Strokes that cross UV island edges are dilated past the seam, no hairline gaps.
Rebuild UVs
Generate a fresh, clean UV unwrap in one step, and keep your paint.
Combine + Unwrap
Merge dozens of tiny sub-meshes with no UVs into one atlas, then paint it as one object.
UV / Texture Panel
Watch strokes land on the flat map in real time, and toggle UV / wireframe overlays.
Mesh Diagnostics
For when something is wrong and nothing will tell you what, a panel that finds it.
Depth, shadow, and repeating surface
Bake light and wear into the texture, and build tiling materials that wrap the model in world space.
Ambient Occlusion Bake
Contact shadows in every crease, seam, and recess, computed from the mesh and written straight to the texture.
Lighting Bake
Set your key and ambient lights, then bake that lighting into the map for engines with no lighting of their own.
Dirt & Edge-Wear Bakes
Add grime and worn edges along hard geometry, with region tools to aim wear exactly where you want it.
Pattern Builder
Dial in tiling, rotation, and scale, then project the pattern in world space so it wraps seamlessly, however the UVs were cut.
Seeing the model clearly
Orbit, snap to any face, lock the camera for critical strokes, and check paint under adjustable light.
Orbit Camera & Navigation
Orbit, pan, and zoom naturally, with an Alt/Cmd navigation gate so you never paint by accident. Ortho and perspective, plus a camera lock for stroke-critical work.
View Cube & Face Tool
Snap head-on to any axis, or click a face to look straight at it.
Camera Memory
Tools remember your camera position, so you can pick up right where you left off.
Lighting Preview
Check your paint under adjustable key and ambient light, with ambient occlusion baked live.
Paint it while it's moving
Bring in an animated model and paint directly on it mid-motion, the only honest way to see how a texture holds up when the mesh deforms.
Paint on Animated Meshes
Scrub to any frame, stop on the pose you care about, and put paint on the surface exactly as it will be in motion.
Lock a Pose and Work
Hold the model on any frame and paint it like a static mesh, with every brush, stamp, and fill available. Release it and the animation picks up where it left off.
Catch Stretching Early
Paint on the pose where a logo smears or a fold breaks, fix it there, and know it holds through the whole cycle.
Dedicated avatar tools, not a workaround
Purpose-built support for avatar items: the official bodies are built in, template layouts are understood, and export produces a file the site will accept.
Official Avatar Bodies
Load the official Roblox or Polytoria body with one click and paint on the character itself, no hunting for a reference mesh.
Paint the Body, Not the Template
Paint on the actual 3D body and let MechaPaint work out which template rectangle each stroke belongs in.
Upload-Ready Export
One click writes a correctly laid-out template PNG, sized and positioned the way the platform expects.
Seam-Free & Recolorable
Painting in 3D removes template boundaries, so patterns run cleanly around a limb. Recolor or swap a logo to spin out a whole colorway.
Fur, scales, vines and cloth
Surfaces that would take a week by hand, grown straight onto your model and then painted like anything else.
Fur Factory
Grows short fur on the model, with color, normal and height. Draw Hair Brush lines from root to tip and the fur lies along them.
Scale Factory
Lizard, snake, crocodile and dragon scales, overlapping or granular, with twenty presets and reptile palettes, grown onto the model with real height.
Vine Path
Drop a few guide dots and ivy grows along them, climbing and wrapping around the model. Nudge a dot and the vine regrows.
Fabric
Put any pattern on a rug, a round rug, a flag or a curtain. See it flying, on a floor or in a window, then export it as OBJ and PNG.
Pattern Maker
Seamless tiles from a photo or from noise, cells, stripes, dots and checkers, ready to paint with.
Photo To Model
PhotoMesh turns a photo into a solid textured model. LightMesh turns a picture into a relief for printing.
Colors you can actually buy
For miniature painters, model kit builders and anyone who wants the screen to match the bottle.
Real Paints
Over 13,000 real hobby paints from 38 brands as a color picker. Match The Brush finds the closest paint to any color on your model.
Barcode Scanner
Hold a paint bottle up to your webcam, or use a USB scanner, and that paint becomes your brush color.
Paint List
Every real paint used in your project, most used first, grouped by brand. Copy it, or save it as a shopping list.
Palette Lab
Twenty-four palette generators, from color research to fractals to skin tones. Click a swatch and it is your brush color.
Less hunting, more painting
The small things that keep your hand on the pen.
Quiver
Press Space and your last tools, colors and brush sizes fan out around the pen. Tap one and keep painting.
Feature Search
Press Ctrl+K and type what you want. Every feature in the app is one search away.
Tutor
Ask a question in plain words. The Tutor answers from the manual, and its buttons take you to the right control.
Art Critic
Check your painting the way a painter does: value map, squint test, contrast map, edge map and value groups, right over the model.
Real sizes, ready for the printer
Tools for people whose models end up as real objects.
True Scale
Gradus Adeptus sets the size from a photo of a coin, card or battery. Calibrate sets it from an object in the scene. Export STL, GLB or FBX at real size.
3MF From Your Slicer
Bambu Studio, Orca and Prusa multi-part 3MF files open straight in, along with STL and PLY.
Retopo And Atomic Weld
Retopo builds a clean mesh over a messy one. Atomic Weld pulls every point under the brush together into one.
Measure
A ruler on the model that reads in metric or imperial, using your calibration.
Getting in and getting out
Bring meshes and textures in, write clean maps out, and set up your pen and interface, originals never touched.
Mesh Import & Management
Drag in a mesh, existing textures load, every material slot becomes paintable, nothing on disk changes.
Exporting Textures
Write clean PNGs, per submesh or whole model, merged or separate layers, at your chosen resolution. Originals never touched.
Projects
Save, reopen, and update working sessions as single .mpaint files, with a recents list.
Pen & Tablet Calibration
High-frequency pressure sampling with per-user calibration for clean, natural strokes.
Welcome & Interface Scale
A startup greeting with quick interface-size presets and links to help.
It probably opens what you have
Drag it on, or use the file dialog. LightWave objects are read natively, every version from 6.0 to 2025, each surface arriving as its own paintable submesh.
Models In
FBX, OBJ (with MTL), LWO (LightWave LWO2 and LWO3, every save from 6.0 to 2025, native), USD (.usd, .usda, .usdc), glTF, GLB, DAE (Collada), STL, PLY, 3MF.
Animation In
FBX, DAE, glTF, GLB, BVH, loaded onto a rigged model already on screen, so you can paint it mid-motion.
Images In
PNG, JPG, JPEG, PSD, TIFF, TGA, BMP, EXR, HDR, as base textures, layer contents, stamps, patterns, or floating references, from disk, drag-and-drop, or the clipboard. A photo can also become a paintable mesh or a flat canvas.
Brushes In
ABR Photoshop brush sets imported directly, plus PNG, JPG, JPEG, PSD, TIFF, TGA, and BMP images used as brush shapes.
Fonts In
TTF, OTF, any font installed on your system.
Projects
.mpaintz, one file holding your meshes, every paint layer and PBR channel, masks, selections, decals, paths, references and notes, saved and reopened without loss.
Textures Out
PNG or TGA, merged or per-layer, per-submesh or whole model, at your chosen resolution. Export a flat color texture or a full PBR set named for Unity URP and HDRP, Unreal, Godot, glTF and Blender, Roblox or Substance. UDIM models export as tile sets. Panoramas write back out as cube faces, an equirectangular image, or a 4x3 cross.
Geometry & Platform Out
FBX, GLB with the whole PBR material inside, OBJ with MTL, STL for printing, or LWO, with rebuilt or combined UV maps and per-engine orientation presets, and correctly laid-out Roblox clothing, the R15 Studio body kit, and Polytoria clothing and face templates, ready to upload.
The fine print, minus the pain
What it runs on, what it costs, and which material channels it paints.
App Type & Platforms
A standalone 3D art application that runs on its own, no engine required. Runs on Windows and macOS.
Input
Mouse, or a pen tablet with high-frequency pressure sampling and per-user calibration.
Material Channels
Base color, normal, roughness, metallic, ambient occlusion, and height, each with its own layer stack. Pick a material and paint with it like a color, and all six channels go down under the same stroke. That is not something I have found anywhere else. Of course, it only matters because it means a metal plate looks like metal the moment you paint it.
License
One-time purchase, perpetual, with a year of free upgrades. The download is the full application, every tool, with exports watermarked until you buy.
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