Scratch Pad

The Scratch Pad is a canvas that sits beside the model. You capture something onto it, work on it flat, and then either clone from it onto the mesh or turn it into a set of PBR maps. It is where a surface gets built before it goes anywhere near a material.

Getting something onto the pad

• Set Origin — press it, then click the point in the 3D view to centre the capture on. The pad fills with what is on screen around that point. Until you do, the pad reads Empty. Frame the model, then press Set Origin.
• Load File — load one or more images straight onto the pad. With several at once, Vertexix asks which channel each one belongs to.
• Load — load a saved .vsp surface back onto the pad, with all of its channels intact.
• Clear — back to a clean white canvas.

You can also paint directly on the pad. Tile repeats it so you can see how the surface behaves when it wraps, and the window title shows the current zoom. View switches between Shaded and any single channel, so you can check the normal or the roughness on its own.

Cloning between the pad and the model

Pick the Clone Brush and click the pad to set the clone source — then paint on the mesh and you are stamping the pad onto the model. It works in the other direction too, so you can lift a piece of the model onto the pad, fix it flat where it is easier to see, and clone it back.

Deriving PBR maps from the pad

A photograph of a surface is not a material. The pad can derive the missing channels from the image it is holding:

• Create Metallic Map
• Create Roughness Map
• Create Normal Map
• Create Height (bump) Map
• Create Displacement Map
• Create Ambient Occlusion Map
• Create Specular Map

Each generator shares the same set of controls, applied in this order:

Control	What it does
Invert image	Flips light and dark before anything else reads it.
Blur	Softens the source first, so film grain and sensor noise do not otherwise become surface detail.
Black level	Where the darkest part of the source lands.
White level	Where the lightest part lands.
Midtones	Bends the curve between the two.
Strength	How pronounced the finished map is.

Previewing and saving

Material Preview opens a lit shader ball wearing the pad's channels, so you can see the surface as a material rather than as a set of flat images. Wrap X and Wrap Y stretch it, 1:1 restores the ratio, and a detail slider trades triangles for speed.

Save writes the whole pad — every channel — as a .vsp file in assets/surface, together with a posed thumbnail, and it joins the Surface Presets library. Edit brings a saved surface back onto the pad to change it.