Stencil Painting

A stencil is a greyscale image locked to the screen, like a card held in front of the model: paint through it and the pattern transfers onto the surface. Where the stencil is light the stroke lands at full strength, where it is dark the stroke is blocked, and greys in between scale it — so one pass with a large soft brush lays down the whole pattern at once.

Turning it on

The Stencil icon sits in the Painting tool row, after the Mask icon. Like Mask, it is a toggle, not a tool: switching it on opens the Stencil panel (below Pen Settings) and does not change which brush you are holding — Paint Brush, Eraser, Blur, Smudge and Clone all paint through the stencil while it is active. The panel stays visible for as long as the toggle is on, even while you work in other sidebar sections.

Two things must both be true before the overlay appears and painting is affected: the toggle is on, and a stencil image is selected in the library grid. Picking an image and arming the toggle are deliberately independent — your selection is remembered while the toggle is off.

The stencil library

The panel opens with a grid of thumbnails on a black backdrop (black, so a greyscale pattern reads at its true tones), sized so at least five fit per row. The library is shared across all models and sessions — the images live in assets\stencils beside the executable.

• Select a stencil by clicking it; click it again to deselect. Hovering shows its name and pixel size.
• Import with the + button at the end of the grid. Accepted files: PNG, JPG/JPEG, BMP, TGA, GIF, HDR, PSD. Color images are treated as greyscale. An image larger than your edition's limit (table below) is downscaled on import, preserving its aspect ratio — a stencil is never squashed to a square the way a brush tip is.
• Rename or Delete a stencil from its right-click menu. Deleting removes the file from the library folder.

Edition	Max stencil image size
Free	1024 × 1024
Vertexix Light	2048 × 2048
Vertexix	4096 × 4096
Vertexix Ultra	8192 × 8192

Placing the pattern on screen

The stencil is locked to the screen, not the model — orbiting the camera slides the surface underneath the pattern, which is exactly how you aim it. The controls, top to bottom:

• Inverse Stencil — flips light and dark, in the overlay and in what gets painted.
• Repeat — on (default): the image tiles at its own pixel size, repeating endlessly across the viewport. Off: a single copy, scaled to fill the viewport without distortion — and paint is blocked entirely outside it, like the edge of a physical stencil card.
• Stencil Opacity (0–100%, default 50%) — how visible the overlay is in the viewport. Visualization only: it does not change how strongly strokes paint. Stroke strength comes from the brush's own Strength and the per-channel sliders, scaled by the stencil's tones.
• Stencil Rotation (0–360°, default 0) — rotates the pattern, tiles included, around the center of the viewport.
• Stencil Size (10–500%, default 100%) — scales the image (or one tile of it, with Repeat on). 100% is its native pixel size.
• Stencil Aspect X / Y (10–500% each, default 100%) — stretches the pattern horizontally or vertically. Deliberately two independent values, for stretching a pattern on purpose.

Every slider has its own reset button, and clicking inside a slider never jumps its value — drag to change it, or double-click to type an exact number (Enter commits, Esc cancels).

To move the pattern, right-click-drag in the viewport. The pattern follows the cursor 1:1 regardless of the Size/Aspect/Rotation settings; with Repeat on it scrolls and wraps, with Repeat off it carries the single copy wherever you drag it.

Painting through it

1. Enter Painting mode and set up the brush and channels as usual.
2. Toggle Stencil on and select an image from the library.
3. Aim: orbit the camera and right-click-drag the pattern until it sits over the region you want, adjusting Size/Rotation/Aspect to taste.
4. Paint. Strokes transfer the pattern onto the surface; keep painting until the coverage is what you want, then toggle the stencil off.

What carries over from ordinary painting — all of it:

• Every enabled channel receives the stenciled stroke at once, the Normal Map's paint modes included, and strokes still resolve correctly across UV seams and into the padding.
• The stroke lands on the active texture layer, with the current blend mode and dynamics.
• A Paint Mask composes with the stencil — a texel must pass both to receive paint. No mask is required, though: with none, the stencil paints anywhere it shows.
• Both meshes work — the stencil paints on the Loaded Mesh and the Generated Mesh alike.
• Stenciled strokes are ordinary strokes to Undo (Ctrl+Z).

The stroke trail

Seeing where you have already painted through a busy pattern is hard, so while the stencil is active every stroke also leaves a translucent trail on the surface in your action-button color (Settings > Interface). The trail is pure feedback: it is never written into any texture, it exists per material, and it disappears — with no way to save it — the moment the Stencil toggle goes off. The real paint it traced is already in your channels.