Updates, MechaPaint

September 15, 2026

A Personal Library that follows you from project to project, and Head In A Jar turns a photo into a printable sheet

The Personal Library. This is the first store in MechaPaint that lives outside your projects, so anything you put in it is there in every project you open afterward. Textures, references, brushes, colors and real paint bottles all go in, and the library root is a setting, which means you can point a desktop and a laptop at the same synced folder and share one collection between them. Items are copied in rather than linked, so your tiles keep working after a drive is unplugged or a source file moves. Click a tile to select it, double-click to use it, and Ctrl+click to reveal the file on disk. A real paint opens as a jar, with its brand and catalog code along for the ride.
Every paint jar has a menu now. A small caret sits on the lid of each glass jar in the viewport, and right-clicking anywhere on the jar opens the same menu. From there you can paint with the jar, add it to your Personal Library, open the library, find similar paints, add it to favorites, copy the catalog code or the hex, and put the jar away. Picking the jar up by the lid and painting with the glass both still work exactly as they did, so the menu is a third gesture rather than a replacement for either. Real Paints
Head In A Jar. The Halloween trick, done properly. Feed it a photo of a head, and it hands you a print-ready sheet that you roll into a glass jar and light from inside so the face appears to float in the glass. It puts the photo on a real cylinder at your jar's real inside diameter and works out where a viewer standing in front of the glass sees each point, so the stretch, the viewing distance and a jar sitting below eye level all come out of one calculation. Mason quart, pint and half-gallon jars are in the presets, along with pickle and apothecary shapes. It cuts the background away from behind the face, tells you up front when a background is too busy to cut cleanly, stamps the print resolution into the file so the sheet comes out at the size it was computed for, and prints a labeled 100 mm ruler bar in the margin so you can check the scale in one second. There is a lit preview of the jar, too, so you can look at the whole thing before you spend any ink.
The library opens from the top row. The Personal Library button sits at the head of the top toolbar, just left of New, where the rest of the bring-it-in and put-it-away commands live. Its window wears the same dark interface as everything else, and the Add Files button picks up your own accent color on hover.

September 14, 2026

Transparent images now paste with their alpha intact, and you can paste straight into the UV panel

Clipboard pastes keep their transparency. Copy an image from Chrome, Firefox, Photoshop, Figma, GIMP, Krita, Paint.NET or Affinity, paste it into MechaPaint, and the transparent parts arrive transparent. Windows publishes a copied picture several times over in several formats, and MechaPaint now asks for the one that carries the original alpha. Every paste in the app inherits this at once, so Ctrl+V reference windows, New Project from the clipboard and the PhotoMesh clipboard square all benefit. References
Paste into the UV and Texture panel. Copy has always pushed the map you are looking at out to the clipboard, and now there is a way back in. Paste brings a clipboard image in as a new top layer on the submesh the panel is showing, alpha and all, as a single Ctrl+Z step. It arrives as its own layer, so your active layer is untouched and you can merge it down, delete it or re-blend it from the Layers list whenever you like. A non-square image is scaled to fit at its own aspect and centered on a transparent margin, and a Copy then Paste round trip on the same mesh comes back pixel-identical. UV panel
The Screen brush stays round at any angle. With Brush Orientation set to Screen, the brush and its hover ghost are now a round camera-facing overlay that fills the size ring no matter how steeply you are looking at a surface. Aiming at a wall from a grazing angle lays down the full footprint, and the toolbar toggle and the sidebar Texture Orientation setting now agree with each other, so either one asking for Screen gets Screen. Surface orientation keeps hugging the face the way it always has. Brush docs
Reference window menus stay on screen. The caret menu on a reference or Paste window now floats clear of the window frame, so Create Brush, Create Texture, Save and Restore Relationship, Reset Aspect and Reset Size are all reachable even on a window shorter than the menu itself. If the menu would run past the bottom of the screen it slides up to fit. References

v1.9.7 / September 12, 2026

Over 13,000 real paints in the picker, PBR channel settings in every tool, and a Face Camera tool for cards and foliage

Real paints

13,238 real paints from 38 brands. The Real Paints picker is now stocked with 13,238 buyable paints, each one carrying the manufacturer's own catalog code or SKU. Model and miniature bottles, spray cans, craft and artist acrylics, and a full wall of house colors are all in there together, from Acrilex and AK Interactive through Tamiya, Vallejo and Warcolours. This might be the largest real paint library ever put inside a 3D painting app! What that buys you is simple. The color you land on in the viewport is a color you can hold in your hand, and Match The Brush still ranks the 40 closest bottles to whatever your brush is holding. The library keeps growing as I find good color data for more brands. Real Paints

PBR everywhere

Your channel settings come along in every tool. The channel chips that arrived with the brush now steer the rest of the toolbox. Set Color, Metal, Rough, AO, Height and Norm the way you want them, then fill, stamp, spray, sand or dab, and those are the channels that get written. One place to say what a stroke is made of, and every tool reads it. Brush docs

New tools

Face Camera. Paint the normals under your brush so they point straight at the viewer. That is the old card trick, and it is what makes grass, foliage, hair and billboard cards catch light as one soft surface instead of a stack of flat planes. Brush size, hardness, shape, spacing, opacity, symmetry and tape all work on it, so you can aim a whole lawn or just the tufts that were catching a hard edge.

Fixes and polish

Sandpaper fixes. The sanding tool got a round of repairs, so grit, corner, flat rate, scratch, flow and bite all land the way the options read. Plenty of smaller improvements rode along with it.

September 11, 2026

The sanding tool now lays down your PBR channel settings, not just color

Sanding writes every channel you asked for. Set the channel chips the way you want, pick up the sandpaper, and the metal, roughness, occlusion and height values you chose land wherever the sanding lands. The sanding options still own where the paint goes and how much of it goes there, so radius, proximity, edge threshold, grit, corner, flat rate, scratch, flow and bite all behave exactly as they did. The chips simply decide what gets written. Each channel gets the same accumulation and dwell as the color pass, and the whole stroke is still a single Ctrl+Z. Brush docs

September 10, 2026

Pick exactly which PBR channels a brush stroke writes, and a Norm slider that raises and lowers relief

Six channel chips. A row of chips now sits with the brush color, one for Color and one each for Metal, Rough, AO, Height and Norm. Switch on the ones you want and a stroke writes those and leaves the rest of the surface as it is. Color alone paints over a material and keeps its shine and its bumps. Rough alone gives you fingerprints, wet patches and scuffed clearcoat. Height alone gives you dents. Your old glaze setting carries straight over on first launch. Brush docs
Every channel has its own switch. A thin bar above each chip turns that channel on and off, and the chip itself sets the name, the value and which channel the slider is aiming at. One click, one job, so you always know what you just pressed. The bars are drawn in a light gray when they are off, so an off switch is as easy to read as an on one.
Norm runs from minus one to plus one. Slide it either way and a plain color stroke becomes a bump brush, raising or lowering the relief under the dab with your brush size, hardness, shape, spacing, opacity, symmetry and tape all working on it. Leave it at zero, where it reads Flat, and a stroke lays down flat relief the way it always has.
Zero is a real value. Setting a channel to zero now writes zero and keeps the channel on, so a fill of dielectric metal, mirror roughness or full occlusion is yours for the asking. The bar is the on and off control, and the slider is the value control.

v1.9.6 / September 9, 2026

A paint list that remembers which bottles you actually used, real paints standing in the viewport as glass jars, and a bucket that fills with materials

New tools

The Paint List. Looking a color up is useful. Knowing every real bottle a model was painted with is the thing you take to the store. The Real Paints window now carries a Paint List button with a live count, and the list it opens separates the paints you PICKED from the paints you USED. A pick starts a row at zero strokes, and the row becomes used the moment the model changes while that paint is your brush color, so half an hour of browsing 12,867 swatches still produces a three bottle shopping list for a model painted in three colors. Used rows sort to the top by stroke count, and Used only hides the rest. Copy, CSV and Save are the first row of the window, grouped by brand by default because you shop one brand at a time, and Save writes .txt or .csv from whichever extension you type. The list travels inside the project file, counts and all, so opening a finished kit a year from now still tells you what painted the hull. Color docs
Real paints as glass jars in the viewport. Press Jar on a picked paint and a little glass bottle of it stands up in the 3D view, next to the model, exactly like the bottles on a real bench. Drag it by the silver cap to arrange your bench however the work wants it, click the paint inside the glass to load your brush with it, and hover it to read the brand, the catalog code and the hex. The glass is drawn as an outline over the scene, so the model shows through the empty band above the paint and even a near-black color stays readable. Alt+click the glass puts a jar away, the same gesture the favorites strip uses. Your bench saves with the project and comes back where you left it, and it follows the viewport when you resize the window. Color docs

Materials

The paint bucket fills with PBR materials. Arm a material on the Material Brush, pick the bucket, and color, roughness, metalness, normal, occlusion and height all land together in the region you clicked. It works in the color flood, in Islands with its mirrored twin, and across Model and Mesh scope, and the whole fill collapses into a single Ctrl+Z. A bucket fill and a brush stroke of the same material now produce identical texels, because both read the material baked into that part's own UV space. Material docs
Every tool keeps working while the Online Materials window is open. Brush, dab and bucket all stay live with the browser on screen, so you can pick a material and use it without closing anything.

Interface

The Texture Factory wears MechaPaint's own theme. Style, Palette, Size and the layer blend pickers are dark menus that live inside the window, the Seed box is dark with white glyphs, the reference picker is the same dark popup the rest of the app uses, and the close box sits in the upper left of the header where every other MechaPaint window keeps it. Pattern docs
Sidebar checkboxes lead with the box. The check mark comes first and the label follows, so a long label in a narrow panel still leaves the box right there under your cursor.

v1.9.5 / September 7, 2026

An Edge Angle map that paints corner sharpness onto the model, and exposure dots that know a pocket from a peak

New tools

The Edge Angle map. A new section in the Lighting sidebar paints the sharpness of every corner straight onto the albedo as false color, and it reads in real degrees you can name. A tight valley at 90 is deep blue, flat is green at 180, a cube's outer edge is yellow at 270, and a knife thin spike is red at 360. High reads as exposed, which is exactly what a wear artist wants to see before laying chips and scuffs. Deadband, Width, Strength and a flat background fill are on the panel, the legend takes its colors from the same table the baker uses so the two always agree, and each submesh bakes as one undo step. Lighting docs
Exposure dots at every vertex. Turn on Vertex dots and each vertex gets a disc colored by how much open sky it can see, measured as the real exterior solid angle around that point. A three wall inner corner and a vertex tucked inside four walls now read as clearly different, which is the whole point of an exposure map, and a cube's outer corner reads brighter than its own edges because it genuinely is more exposed. The math is exact against the solid angle integral on every case I checked, and triangulation diagonals contribute exactly nothing, so two models of the same shape cut into triangles differently give you the same dots. Dot size is on the panel, and a vertex split across a UV seam gets one identical dot on both islands. Lighting docs

Painting

Surface orientation keeps the dab on the surface you clicked. Painting in Surface orientation now clamps the depth of the projected dab to a thin slice around the point you hit, so a sleeve over an arm or a panel over a hull takes the paint you aimed at it and the shell behind it stays as it was. The reach is a tunable distance, so you can open it up on a large model.

v1.9.4 / September 6, 2026

An Import window, PBR that matches ambientCG, 2,200 more real paints, and a much shorter File menu

New tools

An Import window. The toolbar Import button now opens a catalog of everything MechaPaint can read: models, projects, reference meshes, BVH motion, images, HDRIs, image brushes, Photoshop .abr sets, textures, Megascans folders, fonts and UV transfer, sixteen cards in five groups with the file extensions listed under each one. Click a card and it opens the right importer. I built it because nothing in the app told you it opens a .lwo or an .abr. Import docs
Sherwin-Williams and Krylon in the real paints database. 1,948 Sherwin-Williams colors across Color Wall, Designer Color Collection, Timeless, Historic and Archived, each listed by its SW number, plus 252 Krylon colors across 20 lines including Fusion All-In-One, COLORmaxx, Rust Tough and Chalky. The database now holds 12,655 paints from 34 brands. Sherwin-Williams is the first house paint brand in there, and because wall colors are muted by design, a muted brush color will often match them first. Use the Brand dropdown if you only want hobby bottles.

Real paints

The window is two sections now. The top half is Real World Paint to MechaPaint: search, the Brand and Line dropdowns, and the swatch grid. Find a bottle, click it, your brush becomes it. The bottom half is MechaPaint to Real World Paint: your current brush color and the closest matching bottles. A drag bar between them lets you resize the match list, which now shows up to 40 matches, and the window remembers where you left it.
The filters take up one clean row each. Search runs the full width with its prompt inside the box, and Brand and Line split the row beneath it. The labels are gone since the dropdowns already say what they are.
The match list follows the color picker. It used to update only from the eyedropper. Now any change to the brush color, from the wheel, the sliders, favorites or the palette, re-ranks the nearest bottles.

PBR

The PBR display now matches PBR.ONE and ambientCG. I compared MechaPaint's spheres against the three.js previewer ambientCG uses and fixed everything around the shading that made MechaPaint's look flatter and duller. Reflections default to full strength (the old 0.3 was tuned for Tripo's matte look, and the dial is still there). The PBR display gets ACES tone mapping so hot highlights roll off instead of clipping to white. The studio lights are now small, bright lamps measured against ambientCG's own HDRI, so metal reads as metal. Rough surfaces get a properly blurred reflection instead of a sharp photo of the lamps. And a material folder with both NormalGL and NormalDX now picks GL, so the bumps light from the correct side. Lighting docs
No more white specks on metals. A brushed metal seen at a grazing angle was a field of sparkles. The painted channel textures now carry mip maps so distant normals average out, and an applied material's height map arrives at 12% strength rather than 100%, which was turning every grain into a cliff.
Imported normal maps were far too strong. A GLB normal map that looked right at 20% strength was being decoded with the wrong color space and tilted about 30 degrees on every pixel. It reads at full strength correctly now.
A plain color stroke covers the whole material. Painting a flat color over a PBR material used to tint the color and leave the bumps, roughness and metal showing through. It now covers all six channels, as paint would. If you want to keep the material underneath, use a new layer and blend it. A model with no PBR data at all is untouched by this and gets no extra channels.

Import and export

Every mesh format exports at the measured size. FBX, OBJ, GLB and STL all leave at the size you set with Measure or Resize. Before this only STL read the measurement. The Export window shows the millimeters per unit it is about to use, and the summary repeats it. Measure docs
Special Exports live in the Export window. Skybox, Roblox Clothing, Roblox R15, Polytoria Clothing and Polytoria Face sit at the bottom of the window. Rows that do not apply to the current model stay visible but dimmed, with a tooltip saying what would make them available. Export docs

Interface

The File menu went from twenty-one rows to eleven. New, Open Project, Open Recent Project, Import, Import Recent Object, Save Project, Save Project As, Export, Close, Quit. Every removed row is still reachable from the window it belonged to, and the feature search still finds all of them. Open Project now opens the projects window, and the toolbar's file icons and both caret dropdowns are gone, since the Menu button already covered them.
Material Depot is now called PBR Materials. It has a Downloaded category in the site dropdown that lists everything you already have on disk, at any resolution. PBR Materials docs
Both the color and material swatches stay on screen. A ring in your accent color marks which one paints. The material square is always there, and clicking it opens PBR Materials.
The paint color window drags by its header and closes with the same red box as every other window.
The key light disc sits at the top center of the viewport under the control strip, and only moves aside when the color picker would cover it. Light docs
The T button really resets to the bind pose. A model that came in with an animation used to be stuck in frame 0 of its clip, because I had been treating the imported pose as the rest pose. It now rebuilds the true A or T pose from the skin data, and works on any rig, clip or not. Animation docs

September 5, 2026

One Export window, painted PBR maps that actually leave the app, and 762 Rust-Oleum cans

New tools

A single Export window. File > Export... now opens one window that does the whole job: pick a mesh format (FBX, GLB, OBJ, STL or none), choose a color composite or a full PBR set, pick a naming convention, and point it at a folder. A live line tells you exactly which files it is about to write before you press the button, and the window remembers your export folder between launches. Export docs
Rust-Oleum is in the real paints database. 762 spray cans and brush-ons across 16 lines, including Painter's Touch 2X, Stops Rust, Testors Craft and Chalked, with colors taken from Rust-Oleum's own product pages. Each one is listed by its SKU, the number on the can, so the shop search finds it. Match the Brush works with them like any other brand.

Import and export

Your painted PBR channels export now. A normal map painted with the material brush, a roughness you moistened, an imported metallic map. None of it used to leave the app. The PBR set now writes what you actually painted, blended over each material's base value, and only falls back to generating a map from the color when you never touched that channel. Channels you never painted are skipped instead of shipped as flat gray.
Naming conventions for every engine. Pick Unity URP, Unity HDRP, Unreal, Godot, glTF / Blender, Roblox, Substance or Generic and the set comes out with that engine's file names and channel packing, ORM for Unreal with the green flipped, MetallicSmoothness for URP, and so on.
FBX carries your painted maps. An exported FBX used to reference the imported textures, and its normal map came out flat. It now carries the painted base color, normal, metallic and roughness, from every place you can export FBX.
Quads and n-gons survive the round trip. Import an OBJ or LightWave model, paint it, even rebuild its UVs, and the exported OBJ keeps the original polygons instead of everything coming back as triangles. A face that a UV seam cuts in half writes as triangles and the export summary tells you how many. Rebuild UVs docs
OBJ materials name the PBR maps. When an export writes a PBR set, the .mtl file now points at the normal, roughness, metallic and height maps, so Blender and other readers pick them up without wiring anything by hand.

Interface

Return in a file dialog no longer reopens it. Pressing Return to accept a folder or file used to land on the Browse button behind the dialog and open it again. It stays closed now.
A damaged file says so. Choosing a broken image used to leave a blank preview and a quiet line in the status bar. It now raises a proper alert naming the file and the reason, and a model with several broken textures gets one summary rather than a pile of pop-ups.

September 4, 2026

A glow brush, and your old grayscale brush packs finally work

New tools

Glow brush. Paint a line in any color, then swipe over it with the new Glow brush and the paint that is already there brightens at the center and fades outward into a soft halo. It spreads whatever color it finds underneath, so there is nothing to set up first. It is in the left dock, just under Blur. Glow brush docs

Painting

Grayscale brushes work as brushes now. If you have a pile of PNG or JPG brush tips with no alpha channel, MechaPaint now reads their brightness as the shape instead of painting an opaque gray rectangle. It detects a brush pack on import and works out for itself whether the tip is black-on-white or white-on-black. There is an Alpha from Luminance tick box at the bottom of the Brushes window if you ever want a particular image back as full color. Brushes docs
Load Image takes a whole folder at once. The brush import dialog is multi-select, and the window stays open after a batch so you can keep going. One unreadable file no longer throws away the rest of the batch.
Shift+scroll spins your stamp, your text and your brush. Fifteen degrees a notch, on the surface you are about to paint. The round brush shows its angle with a small tick on the rim of the cursor ring, which disappears when you are back at square. Everywhere else Shift+scroll still zooms. Brush docs
The text box stops spinning against flat surfaces. Dragging text across a backdrop, a floor or the broad flat of a model used to send its bounding box whirling on the smallest pointer move. It sits still now. Text docs

Import and export

Big models come in the right size. Auto-scale on import used to fit a model's height, so anything long and low, a car or a quadruped, arrived several times larger than the app thought, and your brush looked tiny on it. It now fits the largest dimension. There is a checkbox for it in Settings > AUTO-SCALE ON IMPORT, on by default. Import docs

Interface

Closing Adjust Color keeps your result. Adjust Color previews live on the model, so by the time you like what you see you have already made the decision, and the close box used to throw it away. Closing the window, or pressing Esc, now keeps the adjustment, and the footer says so. Use Revert to put things back. Either way one Undo takes the whole adjustment off. Color docs

September 3, 2026

Save your textures as TGA, and a left dock that knows a click from a drag

Import and export

Textures export as TGA. Pick your format once in Settings > TEXTURE EXPORT, or just type .tga on the end of the filename in the Save dialog and that one export goes out as TGA without changing your default. Textures with transparency are written 32-bit so the alpha survives, everything else goes out 24-bit. A linked export keeps whatever format it was set up with, so a file you are updating never quietly turns into a second file under a new extension. Export docs

Painting

Skip Steep Faces no longer breaks Texture Orientation. With the steep-face cutoff turned on, the Texture Orientation setting was being ignored and stamps came out oriented the wrong way. The two settings now work together. Brush docs
Wrap and Texture Orientation are clickable again. They were being grayed out whenever they had nothing to act on, which meant you could not set them up before switching into the mode that reads them. Both are live at all times, and the tooltip tells you when a setting is currently doing nothing.

Interface

A click selects, a drag scrolls. The left tool dock used to ignore a drag that started on a button, and a click in the gap between buttons could leave the whole dock stuck to your pointer until you clicked again. Press and drag anywhere on the dock to scroll it. Press and release without moving to pick the tool under you. An empty gap is safe to click.
The dock reads your pen. Dragging the dock now works from a tablet as well as a mouse. Tablet docs
Tool names stay out of the way of the model. With the name column open, clicking a gap no longer falls through and spins the model behind it, the hover hint lines up with the name you are pointing at instead of hanging off the cursor, and the scroll wheel works over the names as well as over the icons.
Gem options moved to the top toolbar. Angle and Margin were floating on a panel over your model. They now sit in the top toolbar with every other tool's options, with the polygon count and any warning at the end of the same row.
The viewport buttons line up. The notes badge and the help, bug and search buttons were each drawn on a slightly different plate at a slightly different height. They now match each other and sit in an even row.

September 2, 2026

Pick how MechaPaint shows you the size of an imported model

Ruler or silhouettes, your choice. When a model loads, MechaPaint shows you how big it really is. Out of the box that is a height ruler marked in both metric and imperial. If you would rather see it standing next to people-sized silhouettes, turn on Settings > IMPORT SILHOUETTES > "Show silhouettes instead of the ruler". The choice sticks between launches, including for the model that loads at startup. Import docs

September 1, 2026

Guides you can drag across the viewport, and folders that stay where you put them

Guides. A new tool on the left dock. Drop a straight line across the width or the height of the viewport and drag it wherever you want it, for lining up a horizon, a panel edge or the middle of a face. Alt+click a line to remove it, or just drag it off the side of the screen, and CLEAR ALL takes them all at once. Guides save with your project.
Show and hide the guides without leaving your tool. The "+" button in the viewport toggles the lines on and off whatever you are painting with, so you can take a clean look at the model for a second. Shift+click it to jump into the Guides tool.
Exporting no longer moves your import folder. Saving an FBX used to change where Model > Import opened next time, and saving a texture changed where every image load dialog opened. Each one now remembers its own place. Export docs
Four new folder settings, and one that overrides them. Settings > DEFAULT FOLDERS now covers Export Models, Export Textures and Projects as well as Models and Textures. Set a Content Directory at the top and every dialog opens inside that project tree instead.
MechaPaint recognizes a Maya, Modo, 3ds Max or LightWave project folder. Load a model out of one and the app works out the rest of the tree on its own, so image loads, model exports and project saves all open in the right place with nothing to set up.

August 31, 2026

Notes you can pin to the model, and measurements in feet and inches

New tools

Notes. A new tool on the left dock. Drop a note anywhere on screen, type your art direction or a critique into it, then pull its green arrow out and stick the arrowhead on the model. Orbit and the arrow stays aimed at that spot. Notes save with the project, resize from a corner grip, take their own font size with A- and A+, and scroll when the text runs long. The yellow minus folds a note down to a small icon sitting on the place it points at, so you can put a dozen of them away and still see where each one is about. A badge at the lower left counts how many you left in the scene.
Feet and inches. Settings now has a Units toggle, Metric or Imperial. The Measure ruler and the Calibrate readouts switch straight over, reading things like "2 ft 4 1/2 in", and typed lengths understand 5'3", 1 3/8 and 3 ft 4 in. Nothing stored ever converts, so exports are unaffected. Measure docs
PBR Mode on a reference image. Any reference window can now build its own normal, roughness, height and de-lit color maps from the photo, and follow whichever PBR channel you have selected. Pick Normal and the window shows the normal map and paints with it. No AI model, no credits, no account. It reads the image you already have. References docs

Painting

The paint bucket works with a stylus. A quick pen tap could finish inside a single frame, so the fill never happened. Fast taps register now, and land where the tip actually touched. Tablet docs
Drag the left tool dock with the pen. Right-drag anywhere on the tool column to scroll it, and it works with a stylus.
The UV map opens on the channel you picked. Select Roughness and then open the UV window and you get the roughness channel. UV panel docs

Art Critic

"Look at the paint alone" now really does. The button used to desaturate the lit view while the panel still quoted unlit figures, two different pictures stacked. It switches the measurement source properly now.
Isolate a value blacks out everything else. The rest of the painting used to leave a gray ghost competing with the band you were looking at. It goes solid black, and the silhouette still reads.

Fixes

Hidden parts no longer turn black. In the shipped app, hiding a piece with the eye in the Meshes panel could paint it solid black instead of making it vanish. Fixed. Meshes docs
Alt stops sticking after you switch apps. Alt+Tab away and back and the app thought Alt was still held, so scrolling zoomed instead of resizing the brush.

August 30, 2026

The Art Critic looks at your painting, and wet surfaces in one click

Art Critic. A new eye icon on the tool dock. Press Analyze and it photographs your viewport, measures the picture and tells you what it found, flat values, crushed darks, shading baked into the base color, in plain description. Eight views redraw that snapshot to show you what it means: grayscale, a false-color value map, an isolation band you can scrub, 2/3/5 value grouping, local contrast, a squint test, an edge map, and a preview of a wider value range. Because it is looking at a 3D scene it can also separate what is paint from what is light, which a flat image cannot do.
Every finding can also be tried, not just shown. Findings now carry two buttons where it makes sense, one to visualize the problem and one to apply the suggested experiment, so "your values are compressed" comes with an Expand Values you can actually press.
Wet Surface. A new Moisture section in the sidebar with two sliders and one button. It reads the roughness of every visible part and lays down a single Multiply layer: rough surfaces darken like damp concrete, polished ones barely change. One layer, one undo.
One model in, one model out. Rebuilding UVs used to write a separate OBJ per material. A car that arrived as one file left as three objects with no way back inside Blender. It now writes a single OBJ with all its material groups intact. Rebuild UVs docs
Send your camera and lights to Blender. FBX Export has a new "Include camera and lights" checkbox, so the model arrives framed and lit the way you painted it. Export docs

v1.8.4 / August 29, 2026

PBR looks right out of the box, with a chart that proves it

Materials and lighting

The PBR display is on by default. Downloaded metals and surfaces look like their thumbnails the moment you apply them, instead of waiting for you to find the switch. Clay preview moved to Auto to match. Lighting docs
The studio actually has lights now. The reflection environment is a real HDR softbox rig, a key and a fill off to either side, so chrome and polished metal pick up shaped highlights rather than a flat vertical gradient.
Reflections stopped being washed out. The studio cubemap was being re-rendered through the skybox on the way to your model, which grayed it down and threw away its sharpness. It goes straight through now.
PBR Check. Two new buttons under Lighting > Base Material. One spawns a wall of calibration spheres, roughness ramps, metal and dielectric rows, MechaPaint's side by side with Unity's own reference shader, so you can see at a glance whether a material is being resolved correctly. The other traces a single material channel by channel and tells you where a map is being dropped. The chart now brings its own lighting and states what a pass is supposed to look like, so it cannot accuse the scene of the fault it is standing in.

Painting

The eraser flattens bumps instead of carving them the other way. Anything the eraser touches is zeroed out, so criss-crossed bump strokes disappear where you wipe them rather than becoming dents. Eraser docs

Interface

The Material Depot got simpler. A material you have not downloaded yet shows one button, Download. Once the maps land it becomes Fill Layer and Use, and the material drops a swatch under the main paint picker so the brush shows what it is carrying. Nothing needs a Stop Painting With It button any more. Picking another color puts it down.

v1.8.4 / August 28, 2026

Paint with a whole material, and a Gem tool for flat facets

New tools

Paint with a material. Choose a material and paint with it like a color: color, normal, roughness, metallic and height all go down together under the same stroke, with the tiling staying in step across every channel. Brush docs
Gem. Click a flat face and it fills that whole facet, across polygons whose surfaces line up, stopping where the surface bends away, and fades out near the edges instead of stopping hard, so it reads as a facet catching the light rather than a decal stuck on. The fade is measured in millimeters of real size, so it looks the same on a small crystal and a large one.

Baking

Ambient occlusion is clean where two meshes meet. A blob passing through a column used to leave a stair-stepped contact line that read as broken geometry. The bake now measures finer than it writes. Bake AO docs
The dirt edge slider reads in degrees you recognize. It runs 5 to 90, how sharp an edge you want protected, instead of the old 185 to 270, whose bottom of travel did nothing. Wear docs
Long thin UV islands stop refusing paint. The edge-protection band is an absolute width, which was a hairline on a chunky island and a total blackout on a sliver, a part that quietly would not take paint with a slider that appeared to do nothing. It shrinks itself now, or steps aside.

Interface

American spelling throughout. Color, license, center, gray, every label, tooltip and message in the app.
A material layer says what it really holds. A group carrying normal, metal, roughness and height maps could still describe itself as "Color only right now". Layers docs

v1.8.4 / August 27, 2026

Pick a real bottle of paint, and see every blend mode before you choose one

New tools

Real Paints picker. A new window on the dock holds 9,693 buyable hobby paints from 31 brands, Vallejo, Tamiya, Citadel, Mr Color, AK, Army Painter, Scale75 and more. Filter by brand and line, or let it match your current brush color and show the ten closest real bottles. Eyedrop a spot on your model and it answers "what bottle is this", with a Copy button for the full name and code so you can go buy it. Color docs
Blend Preview. Every layer row has a new button that opens all 26 blend modes at once for that layer. Hover a mode and your actual model shows it, full size and lit. Click to keep it. No more guessing which mode does what. Layers docs
Round Trip Test. A single button in Settings writes, reloads and measures OBJ, FBX and GLB files, then tells you whether geometry, UVs and real-world size all survived the trip. Export docs

Painting and color

The blend previews show your model, not a flat sheet. Each mode is previewed from your current camera view, so if you are zoomed into a shoulder, that is what you compare.
The previews are full-width bands. Widen the window and you see more of the art instead of squashed art.
Palette Lab clicks land on the color you clicked. Clicking a band near a soft border used to hand you the neighboring color. It now reads the pixel under your cursor.
Palette Lab got lighter and faster. Resizing the window just stretches the strips instantly, and a small redraw button on each strip re-renders that one sharp when you want it. The abstract painted study under each palette is gone, so more palettes fit on screen.

Import and export

Drop a downloaded material folder on MechaPaint and it just lands. Point Import Folder at a Megascans or Fab surface folder (or drag the folder or its .zip in) and every map, color, normal, roughness, metallic, AO, height, is identified by name and applied to the selected part. Gloss maps are converted, packed ORM masks are unpacked, and one undo removes the lot. Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed. It reads files already on your disk.

Interface

Your canvas size is on the Layers header now. It reads "Layers (Current: 2048px)" with a Change... button that opens 1K / 2K / 4K right there, instead of hiding the number in Settings. Layers docs
The canvas resolution buttons work again. They could get stuck refusing to do anything for the rest of a session, silently, even with a model loaded and painted. They now always respond.
The + and - on the Layers header are visible. They were drawing as a solid teal tile and a blank tile.

v1.8.4 / August 26, 2026

A proper smooth airbrush, and the stylus finally draws in the UV panel

New tools

Airbrush. A second spray tool sits under the Spray Can and lays paint the way a real airbrush does: smooth and even, no grain or scatter. Drag for a continuous band at any speed, hold still and the coat builds gradually. The Spray Can is unchanged if you liked the chunky one. Brush docs
Palette Lab. A new window with 24 palette generators, fractals, chaos, natural pigments, skin tones and several deliberately unnatural sets. Every palette is seeded, so a seed number always gives you the same colors back. Color docs

Painting

The stylus draws in the UV panel. With Windows Ink on, a pen did nothing in the UV map while the mouse worked fine. Drawing, erasing and barrel-button panning all work now. Tablet docs
The airbrush covers the whole ring. Its first pass painted a small dab in the middle and skipped parts of the model under the cursor. One hold now paints everything inside the ring, across UV seams and separate parts, fading out at the edge.
One undo removes a whole material. Applying a material from the Material Depot now makes one linked layer group, so hiding, renaming, moving, deleting or undoing it takes the color and the relief and roughness together instead of leaving half of it behind. Layers docs

Interface

Starting over really starts over. Loading a new model, clearing the mesh or opening a starter object resets the texture, cursor, color, PBR channel and selected layer. Your textures, references and brushes are kept.
The wireframe shows quads on LWO models. Quad models no longer get a fake diagonal drawn across every face. Mesh diagnostics docs

v1.8.4 / August 25, 2026

Measure is its own tool now, and the rule goes where you point it

Just measuring no longer means opening the calibration workflow. Measure is a separate dock tool that shows the draggable rule and nothing else, no card, no option bar. Calibrate stays where it was for when you actually want to set scale.
Measure uses your calibration if you have one. If you have not calibrated yet, it still gives you a live reading by treating one model unit as a meter. That is a label only, and it will never quietly set up a calibration or turn on scaled export behind your back. Export docs
Measure starts at a plain 1000 mm. It no longer opens assuming you have a credit card in the shot. Pick your own length and go.
The rule ends can float free of the model. A new Snap to mesh checkbox in Calibrate, off by default, controls this. With it off, either end follows your pointer anywhere in the viewport, so you can measure a gap or an overhang instead of being dragged onto the nearest surface.

v1.8.4 / August 24, 2026

Quick Texture is now CameraBrush, and its dark halo is gone

Quick Texture is called CameraBrush. Same tool, clearer name. The dock tooltip, the feature finder and the textures it creates all use it now. Your saved settings carry over untouched.
No more dark ring around a click-drag. Dragging a CameraBrush stroke used to leave a dark halo where the soft edges of the dabs overlapped. Overlapping dabs now keep the strongest coverage without darkening the color.
After a capture, you are ready to paint with it. Once a capture becomes your selected texture the paint color goes to white and Follow Stroke turns off, so the first stroke lays down the texture as captured instead of a tinted version of it. Brush docs

v1.8.4 / August 23, 2026

Measure: lay a rule across a credit card and the whole scan reads in real units

A two-point rule for objects already in the shot. If there is a coin, a card or a ruler in your scan, drag the rule across it, type its real length and press Calibrate. No photo, no six points. The known object is already there.
The ends stick to the surface, so a tilted card measures its real edge. Both ends land on the model rather than on the screen, and the crossbars lie flat in the surface under them, so you are lining up two edges instead of squinting at the tip of a line.
Calibrate once, then just drag. After calibration the rule reads live in real units anywhere on the model, so you can measure everything else in the scan by moving it.
Resize is a separate button on purpose. Knowing what something measures never quietly changes what an export writes. Press Resize when you actually want the file at true scale, and the export buttons wake up. Export docs

v1.8.4 / August 21, 2026

See which normals are wrong, and a wireframe that asks before it freezes

Diagnostic Paint can now check a normal map. Two new passes paint faults and surface directions straight onto the texels they live in, so a normal map full of normals pointing the wrong way is something you can look at instead of guess at. Diagnostics docs
Normal Noise finds the grain only the highlights show. The surface that looks pixelated until you hide the normal map is usually compression grain, a wobble too small for the other checks to see, but big enough to shatter a glossy highlight. This pass measures it.
Import a model with PBR maps and the PBR view turns itself on. No more importing a file full of metalness and roughness and staring at a matte model with Lighting saying Off. Import docs
The wireframe warns you before it chews on a heavy model. Turning it on builds a whole second mesh, and on a big scan that was a silent freeze with no way out. It now asks first, runs behind the progress window, and can be canceled.
Gradus Adeptus: export at true scale from a photo. Measure a known object in a photo, pick the same feature on the model, and the export bakes the ratio in. The print comes out the size of the real thing (STL in mm, GLB in m).

v1.8.4 / August 20, 2026

Estimated normal maps from your color, and change resolution mid-paint

Detail Normal From Albedo. A new section that estimates a normal map from the color you already have, and it works on a UV atlas full of small islands. Now derived in object space, so islands no longer come out rotated against each other.
Canvas Resize: change the paint resolution of a model you are already painting. Start at 1K, decide the piece deserves 4K, and go up without starting again. It works downward too.
Black paint on a Color layer no longer turns bright red. A blend-mode math bug made neutral grays pick up a wild hue instead of quietly desaturating. Layers docs
Saved channels come back the way they went in. Reloading a project used to bring normal and roughness maps back paler and flatter than you left them. The files on disk were always fine. The load was the problem, and it is fixed. Projects docs
Five more PBR From Photos controls. A maximum height cap, level tilt and amount, and a pre-blur with its own amount, so a photo shot on a slightly tilted surface stops turning into a sloping height map.

v1.8.4 / August 19, 2026

The Streak brush, the Material Depot, and every channel gets real layers

New tools

Streak - a gravity smudge. Hold the brush and the paint runs downhill, and keeps running for a moment after you let go. Drips travel well beyond the brush, thin out toward where they came from, and leave a bead at the tip where they die. Brush docs
Streak has its own sidebar section. Drip tuning sits between Seam Fix and Brushes, so you can dial how wet the run is instead of taking what you are given.
Material Depot. The online materials browser got a proper name, a window that survives resizing, a big preview thumbnail, a tiling slider above Apply, and an action button that honestly says Download until the maps are actually on your disk.

Painting

Every channel is a real layer stack now. Normal, metallic, roughness, AO and height each used to hold exactly one texture, so a material could be applied to a part but never to part of a part, and never taken back. They stack, reorder and undo like albedo does.
PBR channels are actually saved in your project. They never were. The model happened to re-import its own maps on load, which hid it. Save and reopen now keeps what you painted. Projects docs
Streak stopped bleeding through the model. Runs no longer land on surfaces hidden behind the one you hit, and one spot sheds one drip per stroke instead of gushing.
The tiling brush stopped painting through the model too. Same upside-down occlusion bug, second tool.

Import and export

Grass Card Set export. Grass is a real texture tool now: one modal with an engine dropdown, map tick boxes and near/far cutout previews, and the export writes every map plus a README into one folder. Edges no longer fringe black in an engine, because opaque color is flooded outward before saving.
Quick Texture photographs anything in the viewport. Including the backdrop and empty space, and including very small areas. It stretches the pixels rather than refusing. Projection docs

Interface

New Project remembers what you imported. A Recent Meshes strip holds the last ten models you opened, and Square / Box / Sphere / 9-Square collapsed onto one tidy icon row.
Textures window revamp. A click is the choice, the window stays open, the close box is red, and the tiling controls moved in beside everything else.

v1.8.3 / August 18, 2026

The paint-through bug, found and fixed

The Multiverse Brush stopped painting through the model. The cause was an occlusion lookup reading upside down. The brush now measures which way round it is instead of assuming. Single-sided surfaces are covered too.
The tiled brush would not paint inside a body-shaped hole. Same bug, second tool, also fixed.
The Multiverse Brush picks a sensible source the first time you open it instead of waiting for you to choose one before it will do anything.
Low Poly brush: the face you are building only ever grows. Continuing a stroke extends the selection instead of starting a new wall, and the selection no longer wraps around sharp edges onto the far side.
Loading a reference mesh no longer takes the scene down with it.

v1.8.3 / August 17, 2026

Free CC0 materials, a hand for the reference mesh, and a straight horizon

New tools

Online Materials - free CC0 textures from ambientCG and Poly Haven. Browse both sites in a floating window and one Apply gives the active part a whole PBR set: color, roughness, metalness, normal, AO and height. No account, no key, nothing to license.
The Reference Gizmo. Move, rotate and scale the reference mesh by hand in the viewport instead of typing numbers into a sidebar, and rotation is no longer yaw only, so a reference exported Z-up can be stood back up. References docs
The File Info window. A Show Info button under the file path tells you the path, how many textures are embedded and what they are called, so you can tell whether a downloaded model is importing real metal or whether MechaPaint is making it up. Import docs

Painting and view

Hold Shift to snap the screen spin to 5 degrees. On both instruments. The spin gesture is easy to trigger by accident, and "turn it until it looks straight" was not a way back.
Quick Texture paints back at life size. A new Match Scale option, plus the tool finally shows its cursor. The reticle was being hidden by the tool's own flag.
A gradient backdrop, and a Reflections dial. The studio look is session-only now, so trying the PBR display once no longer means every later launch starts in it. Lighting docs
PBR display fixes. The halo around a PBR-off model, the preset buttons that did nothing, and the sun disc seen edge-on are all sorted.
PBR From Photos is its own sidebar section now, and the build number is stamped on the logo so you can say which version you are running.

v1.8.3 / August 15 - 16, 2026

Paint with pixels from another model, and one file for the print shop

The Multiverse Brush. Paint with pixels borrowed from somewhere else, another layer, or a whole second model loaded alongside yours. Hover where the two overlap and the brush circle shows you what that other surface wears at that point in space. Stroke, and those pixels land on your active layer.
The model you borrow from is read only, and it turns up the right size. It never joins your layers, never appears in the Meshes list and never lands in an export. It also gets the same sizing your own model got on import, so it arrives at matching height instead of about half of it.
3D Print (GLB): the whole painted model in one file. A new export target writes every submesh and its color into a single .glb for a full-color print service. No sidecar files, nothing for anyone on the far end to reassemble. Export docs
Rebuild UVs (No Transfer). A second button in Mesh Tools that gives a model a fresh UV map and a blank canvas, leaving the old paint behind on purpose. It tells you that before you commit and again afterwards, and your original model and its layers are untouched. Rebuild UVs docs
The brush ring lies flat on the surface now. It follows the curve of whatever is under it instead of facing the camera, and draws a short line out along the surface normal, so you can see which way the paint is about to go before you press. Brush docs

v1.8.2 / August 14, 2026

Every LightWave file since 1998, Collada, and FBX export

Import and export

LWO2 opens now, so every LightWave object from 6.0 to 2025 does. MechaPaint read LWO3 only, and told everyone else to resave in LightWave 2024, which is advice you can only take if you already own the one release that writes LWO3. Now the file opens as it is: surfaces, layers, UV maps and the color texture the surface actually names, off a drive of work going back to the nineties. LightWave and MechaPaint
DAE (Collada) now loads as a model as well as an animation. MechaPaint would happily load a Collada animation onto a model it could not itself open. It opens the model now too.
Export the whole model as one FBX. New FBX Export in the Meshes sidebar: every submesh in a single binary file, instead of an OBJ, an MTL and a PNG per submesh for something to reassemble on the far end. Export docs
A new model no longer arrives wearing an old model's texture. An import could grab a same-named image from a completely unrelated folder on your disk and never mention it, which is why the same generic texture kept coming back for some models. It loads the texture the file names. If two files genuinely collide it loads neither and says so, because a wrong texture is one you paint over and ship.

Interface and speed

Ctrl+click a mesh in the sidebar to go find it. The part unhides if it was hidden, the camera frames that part and nothing else, and it pulses so you can see which one answered. Useful at about the fortieth submesh.
The dirt bake uses every core you have. The cavity trace now runs batched across all of them. Same result, same rays, considerably less waiting.
Find a Feature is draggable. Grab the Ctrl+K panel anywhere but the search box and move it off whatever you were trying to read.

v1.8.2 / August 13, 2026

A place to hang out, and calibration you can trust

The Discord has a home page. One page that says what the server is, what actually happens in there, and how to join. Every Discord mention on the site now points there. Come say hi
Tell Calibrate how tall your model is. Ideal Texels calibration now starts two ways: type the model's real height for an exact answer, or eyeball it with the 1m ruler like before. If you know the mech is four meters tall, you should never have to drag a stick until it looks right. Ideal Texels docs
A new model no longer shows up wearing an old model's texture. Importing a model could grab a same-named image from a completely different folder on your disk and never say so. Now the importer loads the texture the file actually names, and if two files genuinely collide it loads neither and tells you, instead of guessing.
Calibrate gives the same answer at every UI scale. Running the app at a UI scale other than 1 quietly lowered every suggested texture target by that factor. The suggestion now measures against real screen pixels.

v1.8.1 / August 10 - 12, 2026

The Bump Brush, a brush you draw yourself, and six more image formats

New tools

The Bump Brush. A brush that writes to the height map and nothing else, so you can carve and raise real surface detail without touching your color. Strokes now have a cross-section, Round, Chisel, Soft or Peak, instead of a flat floor with a hard edge, and it can write to the normal map too.
The Brush Builder. Draw a shape and it is already the brush. No exporting a PNG, no round trip through another app. The Brushes window also got a "None" tile, so picking a brush is no longer one way. Brush docs
ZBrush-style brush gradients. Falloff you can shape, on any brush.
Paint Hidden now answers in three states. White, gray and black: fully visible, partly buried, completely buried. It used to test one point per polygon and call the whole face, which made a half-sunk part a coin toss. Mesh diagnostics

Import and export

Six new image formats. TGA, BMP, HDR, TIFF, EXR and PSD now load anywhere MechaPaint takes an image, through one shared decoder. PSD reads the merged composite. HDR and EXR come in tone mapped, as viewable images.
Export settings moved out of the dialog. The format, Composite PNG, PBR or Roblox PBR, is now a property of your project in the Meshes sidebar, so it is set once. Export docs
Export stops asking twice. The first press picks a destination, every press after that overwrites the same set silently, with Export / Export As... on the caret exactly like Save.
The export button lights up when your files are out of date and goes dim when they are current. Dim never means disabled, a dim press still exports in full.
Hidden layers are never exported. A PNG now shows what the model shows. Your project file still keeps every layer.
LightWave users get sensible folders. MechaPaint recognizes a content directory and opens image dialogs in Images, saves projects into Scenes, and points exports at where the LWO's textures actually are.

Painting

Painting at low opacity makes the mesh actually see-through. Transparency now lives outside the layer stack, so alpha survives having an opaque layer underneath it. Layers
A hidden layer can no longer be the paint target, so a stroke can never land somewhere you cannot see it. Hiding a layer also lights the Save button.
Layers "..." now has Clear, which empties a layer without deleting it. Name, blend mode, opacity and stack position all survive.
Undo stopped leaving a brush dab behind. Ctrl+Z could paint the hover preview onto the layer for real. Fixed. Undo and redo
Depth and Relief do something again. The bump normal was always saturated, so both sliders were quietly doing nothing.

Interface

The left tool dock scrolls on a short window. Drag it up and down, or use the wheel. Nothing drags when everything already fits.
File shortcuts. Ctrl/Cmd + S, Shift+S for Save As, plus O, N and E. Projects
The mesh picker's arrows stay put. They used to move every time the mesh name changed length, which meant cycling a 17-mesh model moved the button you were clicking.
The key light marker turns with the light instead of facing you no matter where the light is, and it moves out of the way of the color picker.
No more white OS menus. The Export As list, the bake source picker and the Ideal Texels bar all wear MechaPaint's dark theme now instead of a stray light one.
An export dialog no longer blanks your texture to get in front of itself, which looked exactly like losing your work at the moment you were deciding whether to save it.
The Diagnostic Paint window got a real titlebar and a real resize corner, and Paint Issues now paints only the colors its own key explains. Undo takes the markings down with it.