Free Blender Texture Painting Add-On Ucupaint 3.0 Is Now Available

It's been a while since we last covered ucupumar's Ucupaint, and according to the developer, the new features and improvements in this release were significant enough to skip version 2.5 and jump straight to 3.0. Ucupaint 3.0 has finally arrived after a year of development, bringing what is said to be the biggest update to the Blender add-on yet.

First, the UI has been cleaned up with a greater focus on the layer list. Other panels are now hidden by default under collapsible sections or popover buttons, and a Base Layer is also created automatically to edit the base values of all channels.

Height and Vector Displacement now have their own channels instead of being part of the Normal channel. This simplifies things and leaves more room for future improvements. The Displacement Setup toggle is now a Quick Displacement Setup operator. It works the same way, enabling displacement and subdividing the mesh, but you can run it multiple times to check if you have enough polygons.

Previously, channels and layers had separate preview modes. In version 3.0, these are combined into one preview mode for checking channels, layers, layer alpha, masks, or custom data:

Next up, you can now add Adjustment Layers, which use the previous layer's data and let you apply modifiers to it. New decal types have also been added: spherical and cylindrical decals.

Channels now need a bake target before they can be baked, letting you customize the name, resolution, and other settings independently. No need to create one manually, though, as Ucupaint generates a bake target for each new channel using the settings from the Bake Ucupaint node. The new system also lets you use ORM maps or color attributes as bake targets.

There's also a new Ucupaint logo, along with a list of various bug fixes. Ucupaint 3.0 has been tested and is compatible with Blender versions ranging from 2.76 to 5.3.