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Flow Material Painter
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[Tutorial] Material Painter in Flow 3.0

Discover the new way to append materials in Flow 3.0. With Flow Material Painter tool, provided since Flow 3.0, precise painting materials to your objects is now easier than ever, probably even easier than using the Asset Browser.

You can now find the Material Painter tool among the tools on the left side of the 3d Viewport. You can also activate it by pressing the [ key on your keyboard, that is located next to the P key. This shortcut will switch you between Asset Painter and Material Painter, so you may need to press the key twice.

Basic usage of Material Painter

Picking the materials

Using the Material Painter is really simple. There are two modes, with which you can select your materials. Local mode will allow you to pick the material from the current Blend file, while Library mode will allow you to select and load the specified material from your Flow Libraries.

Library Material selector
Local materials list
When using Library mode, if you pick the material, that is already used in your scene, it WILL NOT be duplicated. The addon will always first check if the asset already exists in your scene.

Painting the materials

To paint the selected material to your object, you just need to select this object first, and then press CTRL + LMB over the area, that you want to paint your material on. There are several modes, that will be limiting the painting area.

Paint modes

By default, Sharp Edge mode is selected. That means that the painted area will be limited by the sharp edge with the angle specified in tools settings (30 degrees by default).

The other modes are:

Face – then you will paint only on the single face. It’s recommended to use this mode rather in the Edit Mode, where you can see your meshes wireframes.

Seam – with this mode, the area will be limited by UV Seams created on your meshes. It’s also recommended to use this mode only in the Edit Mode.

Material – in this mode, the painting area will be limited by the material on your mesh. It can be done in two ways. The first one replaces the entire material slot in this object, the other one paints the new material over the connected faces, using the old material.

Initial object -> Material Slot Replacement -> Linked Faces Replacement

Linked Geometry – this mode will replace the material for the single linked geometry within one object. So if you for example have two separate cubes created as one object, the material will be painted only on one of them

Object – this mode will replace the material on the whole object

Extra Settings

Auto Generate UV – when this option is enabled, Material Painter will be automatically generating (or regenerating!) UV maps for the selected painting area while processing the paint operation.

Auto Generate UVs Disabled vs Enabled

Remove Unused Slots – when enabled, all unused material slots will be removed from the object when processing the painting operation. This can help preventing dozens of unused remaining materials on your objects when painting.

Surface Painter

Flow Material Painter is very similar tool to our other product – Surface Painter. Painting on the objects looks almost exactly the same, but when Flow Material Painter is to paint the entire materials on your objects, both local and from library, the Surface Painter generates each simple material from scratch, basing on the selected surface and picked color. Combine them both to experience the best way to create and reuse materials in Blender.

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I'm the founder of digital.ARCH and all our products. I work with Blender since about 2008, and this time help me to gather a lot of experience with this software