For those who don’t know the tool: Light Painter is a Blender add-on for lighting lookdev that paints onto a light texture in Cycles using Spot or Area lights, right in the viewport.

Setup: Cycles or nothing

Light Painter by ShaderError depends on Cycles light texture nodes, so it requires Cycles as the render engine. It does not support Eevee for this workflow. The baseline is Blender 3.6 through 5.1, and tCycles as the render engine and GPL as the license. Before you get excited and start scribbling highlights onto your hero asset, there is a short checklist that matters. You need a Spot Light or an Area Light, since the tool only works with those two light types. Point and Sun lights do not apply here, because the workflow relies on directional texture projection.

For sharper painting while you work, keeping the light size small helps. Spot Light uses a small Radius value and a Spot Size under 160 degrees to reduce distortion. Area Light uses scene scale dependent Size and a fairly low Spread value while painting. You can soften things later by changing Radius or Spread, but the painting stage favors crisp edges so you can read what you are doing.

The docs also recommend enabling GPU Compute for performance, since the tool relies heavily on shader computation. CPU rendering still works, but GPU is expected to be faster.

Painting on lights, not on meshes

The core idea is simple: you paint into a texture image that drives the light, and the tool previews the result in the viewport while you paint. You choose the target light in a panel, pick a texture resolution, and run a reset action that initializes the node setup. Then you paint using tools that include a brush and a gradient tool.

Light Painter stores the paint in a light texture image, with selectable resolutions from 512 pixels up to 4096 pixels. Higher resolution gives finer detail at the cost of more memory and slower interaction.

There is also a surface scoping system that controls what receives paint. You can paint on all meshes, a single object, or a collection. Separately, there is a skip list for objects that should behave as transparent for the painting depth pass, like glass windows, translucent curtains, fog and dust volume boxes, wireframe grids, and objects used for volumetric effects. If a see-through object blocks your strokes, it needs to be marked there.

Layers, masks, and the temp EXR stash

Light Painter includes a Photoshop style layer stack per light. Layers have blend modes, opacity, visibility, and transforms, and they composite from bottom to top. Blend modes listed in the docs include Mix, Multiply, Screen, Add, Subtract, Overlay, and Soft Light.

Each layer creates a Blender image datablock to hold pixel data. The layer system also writes temporary files to disk in the OpenEXR format to support undo, persistence, and compositing. These temporary files are cleaned up automatically when the add-on is disabled or when Blender closes, and layer metadata such as names, blend modes, order, and transforms is saved inside the blend file.

Layer transforms are non-destructive in light UV space, with offset, rotation, scale, and a pivot. The docs list shortcut gestures while the brush or gradient tool is active for moving, rotating, and scaling the active layer.

Selections add another control lever. You can build a mask to restrict painting so areas outside the selection are protected. The selection tool supports rectangle, polygon, lasso, and brush shapes, plus modes like add, subtract, and intersect. Expect to use this when you want to localize a fill or protect a face from accidental spill while you dial in a rim.

About that spill: the docs warn about light bleed beyond the painted region when the light source has a physical size. Blender can spread light beyond the texture boundary and into shadowed areas, and the current version does not compensate for that during painting.

Camera space vs light space

There are two paint spaces. In camera space, the paint is designed to match what you see on screen, with brush falloff mapping one-to-one with the viewport result. In light space, the brush math and gradient blending happen in the light texture space, while the brush centre and gradient endpoints come from the viewport, which can look distorted in the viewport depending on angle and distance.

Light space comes with two projection approaches for mapping the cursor. Raycast traces against geometry each frame and falls back when the cursor moves off surfaces. Plane establishes a paint plane on the first click, then projects subsequent cursor positions onto that plane. The gradient tool always uses raycast in light space.

This split is practcial. Camera space supports quick art direction because what you see is what you paint. Light space supports behavior that follows the light texture space more directly, and the docs describe it as a fallback for edge cases where camera space painting fails to cover some texels, such as steep angles or complex shadow boundaries.

Some studios will end up using both in the same shot. Start in camera space for broad strokes, switch to light space for the annoying bits, and remember that the annoying bits always find you in the final.

Preview and troubleshooting

The add-on includes a real-time overlay preview system. One mode previews only what is currently being drawn. Another mode overlays the full light texture and mask across the viewport and marks unpaintable areas in red, so you can see where the light reaches and where it is blocked.

There is also a preview option to show raw paint colour versus a falloff preview that includes rendering factors like distance attenuation and exposure. A light blur option attempts to mimic how Blender spreads the light based on the physical size of the source, with a multiplier to scale the effect.

If the result looks broken, reset the operator that rebuilds the shader node setup and resets layers. Changing light size can reset layers because the texture proportion ties to light size, and the docs recommend undo if the size change was accidental.

Advanced settings in the docs cover near and far clip for the light frustum, a surface bias for shadow acne, softness and bleed reduction controls, and internal capture resolutions.

Pricing and licensing

Light Painter is sold on Superhive in multiple tiers. LightPainter Lite is listed at $12. LightPainter for individuals is listed $36. LightPainter Indie for up to 3 people is listed at $80. LightPainter Full for up to 14 people is listed at $350. LightPainter Studio for 15 or more people is listed at $750. Currently there is a promotion that halves the prizes, no idea how long that goes.

As always, test any new tool and workflow in a controlled scene before it touches production assets, especially anything that rewires nodes, writes temp files, or changes how your lgiht setup evaluates across machines.

// Product page, pricing tiers, compatibility, license
https://superhivemarket.com/products/light-painter

The post ShaderError Light Painter paints light in Blender first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Wafer is a focused 3D texture painting app that sits next to Uniform and CozyBlanket, now stretching from iPad to Windows with a stylized, hand-painted vibe.

Windows gets a new paint box

Wafer now has a free open beta build for Windows. The app started life as an iPad-only release, and this beta marks the first time the tool shows up on a platform outside iPad.

The target is clear: stylised, hand-painted, and NPR texture work. The feature set also aims higher than the word beta sometimes suggests. The app includes multi-channel painting, meaning a single brush stroke can update multiple channels at once, including colour, roughness, and metalness. The beta build on Windows aligns with the current iPad release and includes new features introduced in the Wafer 1.1 update, such as a Smudge tool.

The familiar stuff, in the right places

Wafer leans into an illustration-style workspace, then applies it directly to 3D surfaces. Brushes, layers, and masks sit at the centre of the UI concept. The toolset includes brushes, lasso clips, gradients, wet painting, and blur, all intended to operate directly on 3D geometry.

Layers follow a full layer system approach: paint layers, fill layers, editable masks, blend modes, and opacity. The workflow stays non-destructive.

Symmetry covers both 3D and 2D use, with configurable independent pivots, and mirroring across any axis. That matters for stylized assets where mirrored motifs can be a feature, not a shortcut.

Wafer also keeps 3D and 2D views in sync. You can paint on the 3D mesh with unlit, shaded, or physically based preview modes, or work directly on the 2D texture, with both views side by side.

Multi-channel painting without the busywork

Multi-channel painting is one of the headline capabilities. A single stroke can paint color, roughness, and metalness simultaneously. Wafer also supports custom channel layouts for NPR and stylized shaders, letting you define channel setups beyond the standard trio.

On the production side, the appeal is not just fewer trips between tools. It is fewer chances to drift out of alignment when a material style depends on more than one channel moving together. If you have ever tried to keep painterly color breakup and matching roughness breakup locked in step, you already know the pain. If you have not, congratulations on your serene past life.

That said, multi-channel painting only helps if it matches the rest of your pipeline and shader expectations. New tools and innovations should always be tested before use in production.

Projects, materials, and exporting with intent

Wafer supports projects containing multiple meshes, materials, and texture sets at once. That matters for anything beyond a single prop, and it also matters for stylized characters where separate materials often carry separate rules.

Asset browser built into the app

Wafer includes an integrated Asset Browser meant to keep texture resources close at hand. The browser covers stencils, triplanar mapping textures, brush alphas, HDRIs, decals, and stamps. The pitch is that these assets stay organised and accessible in a single panel, ready to apply as you work.

Within that set, stencils project patterns onto surfaces, triplanar projections wrap textures across 3D geometry, brush alphas provide custom brush tip shapes, and decals and stamps place detail textures with precision.

Performance claims, labeled as claims

The app describes extreme optimization intended to run smoothly on low-spec, older devices. It also states it can push modern hardware with up to 64K resolution per layer. These are marketing claims. It also claims brush and tool performance stays stable and predictable, with minimal impact from texture resolution, layer count, or stroke speed.

For compatibility, Wafer requires no special GPU or CPU features and targets any compatible device from the past 10+ years, listing 256 MB of RAM and OpenGL 2.0.

A published memory table provides approximate peak memory numbers for RGBA 8-bit textures with four layered materials: 150 MB at 4K, 350 MB at 8K, and 900 MB at 16K. It also notes that resolution scaling uses tiles and that available memory is the limiting factor.

One practical wrinkle: the Windows beta can be downloaded directly from the Wafer website, based on an update dated April 3, 2026. The Wafer product page itself currently shows a message that desktop downloads are coming soon.

If you are evaluating Wafer, treat the beta label like it means something. Keep a backup plan, keep your assets versioned, and do not bet a delivery date on a tool you have not run through your own texutre pipeline.

Pricing, or the lack of it

Wafer on Windows is free during the open beta period. A stable release date has not been announced, and official pricing for the stable release has not been announced either. A license server is described as suggesting the Windows version will be priced slightly higher than the iPad release, but no official price is stated.

https://sparseal.com/wafer/

The post Sparseal Wafer opens Windows beta first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: GIMP is a free, open-source cross-platform image editor for painting and comp work, and it plays nicely with Inkscape when you need vectors and pixels to stop bickering. Think Blender for images.

Momentum, but with fewer faceplants

GIMP 3.2 ships as the first 3.2 release dated 2026 03 14, following a year of design, development, and testing by volunteers and the community, with an explicit plan to streamline releases after 3.0. The headline theme is non destructive layers. Text layers already lived that life. Now Link Layers and Vector Layers join the party, and they come with a new safety latch: you must Rasterize before destructive edits like painting. When you regret that choice, Revert Rasterize clears destructive edits and returns the layer to its non destructive state. That little switch quietly saves hours and reputations.

Link Layers let you pull an external image into a composition and scale, rotate, and transform it without losing quality or sharpness. The layer updates when the source file changes, and you can create one via Open as Link Layer in the File menu. You can also swap the linked file later in Layer Attributes.

Vector Layers arrive through the Path tool. You can draw shapes with adjustable fill and stroke settings, and the vector shape updates as the path changes. Non-destructive rotate, scale, and transform apply here too, so the shape stays editable longer. Yes, we like GIMP, and it is fun to watch the momenutm build when layers start acting like they understand revision notes.

Filters stack higher, and channels get invited

Non-destructive filters now apply to channels, not just layers and layer groups. They also apply to the new non-destructive layer types, so you can keep edits flexible without immediately baking them in. Layer groups get a neat trick: an empty group set to Pass through can carry non-destructive filters that affect all layers below it. Stack multiple filters on that group and you get an adjustment style workflow that stays tidy instead of turning into a layer salad.

A new Vibrance filter lands via updated GEGL. It combines Saturation and Hue Chroma behavior for selective saturation, with a specific goal of keeping skin colors from getting over saturated. You can reach it through the GEGL Operations tool or by searching actions with slash. The release also ships companion updates for babl and GEGL as part of the wider toolchain refresh.

New tools and innovations should be tested before use in prdouction, especially when they touch core layer behavior and color pipelines.

Brushes, text, and other daily annoyances get nerfed

A new paint mode called Overwrite replaces color values as you paint without blending alpha values together. It targets pixel art workflows, and it pairs best with the Pencil Tool.

The MyPaint Brush tool updates to the newer Version 2 API from MyPaint. That upgrade adds 20 new brushes, including an arrow brush, grouped under the Dieterle tag. Text editing gets less in-your-face. The on canvas Text Editor can be dragged out of the way while you type, and it supports common shortcuts like Ctrl plus B, Ctrl plus I, and Shift plus Ctrl plus V for paste unformatted text.

https://peer.tube/videos/embed/64DzkCtrEw9aDr88urpAnj

Exports get more grown up

Format support expands, including built-in support for more formats and export support for JPEG 2000, a standard for digital cinema. Export support is added for PSB large document files, matching existing import support. The DDS plug-in can export BC7. The OpenEXR plug-in can render Luminance Chroma images in full colour rather than grayscale. Vector Layers also affect export: SVG and PDF export can include raster and vector layer data together. Import support is added for AVCI (a HEIF variant with H.264 images encapsulated in HEIF).

The small print, literally and figuratively

On Windows, the downloads page lists supported OS as Windows 10 1903 or newer. Now Windows 7 anymore, and that makes you sad, take loooong look in the mirror. On Linux, distribution options include AppImage, Flatpak via Flathub, and Snap via the Snap Store.

GIMP 3.2.0 is the last version distributed as 32 bit on Windows. Starting with 3.2.2 and later micro versions, there will be no 32 bit Windows build. One side effect is that the 32 bit TWAIN plug in for scanning on Windows stops being distributed, with guidance to use manufacturer scanning software for now and an invitation to help build a 64 bit WIA plug in. Pricing is free, and open source – biut you can always donate, they REALLY have earned some help!

https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.2.html

https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

The post The GIMP Team boosts GIMP 3.2 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.