ArmorPaint 1.0 swaps Haxe for C

For those who don’t know the tool: Armory develops graphics tools including ArmorPaint, a standalone application for painting materials directly onto 3D models. Artists import a mesh, paint and layer surface properties, bake geometry-derived maps and export texture sets for DCCs, renderers or engines. ArmorPaint focuses on PBR, and sits between modelling and UV preparation upstream and shading, rendering or engine deployment downstream, with integrations for Blender, Unity and Unreal Engine.

ArmorPaint 1.0 is, first and foremost, a texture painter. Feed it a 3D mesh and you can paint directly on the surface, stack layers and masks, build procedural materials with nodes, bake maps from the geometry and export the resulting texture set for rendering or realtime use.

The target is PBR texturing. In short, physically based rendering describes a material through properties such as base colour, roughness, metallic response and normals so that its behaviour under light remains reasonably consistent across compatible rendering systems. Less “make it shiny somehow”, more “tell the renderer what the surface is.”

Version 1.0 also brings a change less glamorous than another brush preset and considerably more interesting to a pipeline TD: ArmorPaint has been rewritten in C. Armory says the move away from its previous Haxe/V8 architecture reduces memory use while keeping the application firmly GPU focused.

C gets the paint job

Armory says ArmorPaint now uses a C codebase with no garbage collector and no external libraries, plus its own 3D engine, drawing layer and UI. The compressed desktop archives are only a few megabytes. Cute, but storage is not the interesting bit.

The practical claim is lower memory use. Armory attributes part of that to BC7 compression and says the rewrite permits larger models, more layers and higher texture resolutions on the same hardware. Its published comparison includes a seven-million-triangle OBJ on Linux. Those are vendor results, not a universal benchmark, but the target is clear: fewer fights between texture resolution, layer count and VRAM. Rendering targets Direct3D 12, Vulkan, Metal and WebGPU. Ray tracing is documented through Direct3D 12 on Windows, Vulkan on Linux and Android, and Metal on macOS and iOS.

Paint in, maps out

ArmorPaint combines conventional brush painting with node-based materials and brushes. Artists can paint colour and material properties directly onto the model, use masks and fill layers, bake maps from the mesh and inspect the result in rasterized or path-traced views. Output includes 8-bit PNG and JPEG plus 16-bit and 32-bit EXR. Presets cover generic PBR output and Unreal and Unity channel packing, while custom JSON presets can define channel swizzles.

That does not create magical round-tripping, but it does reduce the traditional late-afternoon ceremony of asking which engine wants roughness packed into which channel. Texture import covers JPEG, PNG, TGA, BMP, GIF, PSD, HDR, SVG, TIFF and uncompressed EXR. Mesh import covers OBJ, FBX, BLEND, STL, glTF and GLB, while mesh export is documented for OBJ and GLB.

Mesh chores move closer

The toolset stretches beyond painting with UV unwrapping, a basic UV editor, Decimate, Smooth, Subdivide and Bevel modifiers, normal recalculation and displacement from height. Sculpting is also part of the expanding toolset. The timeline can work with skinned meshes, frame scripts and mesh or layer animation.

The practical benefit is fewer DCC round trips for small corrections. The catch is familiar: edit UVs or geometry in the texture tool and you now have another asset revision to track. Software can remove a hand-off. It has yet to defeat naming conventions.

Local AI, clouds optional

ArmorPaint includes neural nodes for text-to-image, image editing, upscaling and image-to-PBR conversion, with additional image-to-3D and console models documented. The important pipeline detail is locality. Armory says models are downloaded over the internet but inference then runs on the workstation. Windows and Linux use Vulkan for the documented neural workflows, while macOS uses Metal. Armory recommends at least 6GB of VRAM generally, with individual models demanding more.

That can help facilities that prefer not to send source imagery through hosted generation services. It does not eliminate governance: model licences, GPU provisioning and the quality of generated maps still need checking. A plausible roughness map can be very persuasive while being completely wrong.

Live links do the plumbing

ArmorPaint provides live-link integrations for Blender, Unity and Unreal Engine. Their job is refreshingly practical: move an asset into ArmorPaint, work on its materials and return textures to the wider DCC or engine pipeline without quite so much file-browser archaeology.

Open source, paid convenience

ArmorPaint’s source repository uses the zlib/libpng licence, permitting commercial use, modification and redistribution under its conditions. So, it is Opensource, and you can compile it for yourself. If you want a precompiled package, or want to support the developers, Armory also sells the compiled desktop binaries for $19 through the official download page and says updates are included for free. That is not a subscription. Users can build the source themselves or pay for the packaged binaries.

For small teams, that makes ArmorPaint unusually approachable. For studios, it provides options: use Armory’s build, compile internally, or fold the source into a more controlled deployment process. At $19, procurement may actually take longer than the download.