Texture Layers

Every paintable channel of every material can carry its own Photoshop-style layer stack: paint on a layer, blend it over what's beneath with any of 26 blend modes and a per-layer opacity, organize layers into folders, lock what's finished, and merge or flatten when you're done experimenting. Each (material, channel) pair is an independent stack — the Base Color stack of one material knows nothing about its Roughness stack, or about any other material.

Opening the window

Open the Layers window from the Window menu. It is a free-floating panel, like Color Picker and Swatches, so it never blocks the viewport. Its title tells you which mesh it is editing — Layers – Loaded Mesh or Layers – Generated Mesh — and it always follows whichever mesh is currently on screen. Switch the displayed mesh and the panel switches with it; the two meshes keep entirely separate stacks.

Choosing which stack you're looking at

1. Material — picks which material's stacks the panel shows. It follows the single material selected in Selection Tools automatically; picking a different material from this dropdown overrides that, until Selection Tools' own pick next changes.
2. Layer Type — picks the PBR channel (Base Color, Normal, Metallic, Roughness, and so on). The list offers the same roles as the settings windows' Layer View, so a channel appears here exactly when the current mesh actually carries or can carry it.

A pair you have never layered shows a single read-only Base row — the material's existing image, exactly as imported or baked. The stack only becomes real the first time you add a layer or folder; until then there is nothing extra in memory. Base always sits at the bottom, cannot be renamed, locked, or moved, and is skipped by every layer operation.

Reading the layer list

Each row, left to right:

• Eye — shows or hides the layer. Alt+click solos it (hides every other layer in the stack; Alt+click again restores).
• Thumbnail — a live preview of that layer's own pixels.
• Name — click to select, double-click to rename.
• Lock — a locked layer refuses both painting and deletion. The Base layer can't be locked (it can't be painted or deleted anyway).

The selected row is highlighted in your action-button color (Settings > Interface), and it is the layer everything acts on: brush strokes paint into the selected layer, and the Mode/Opacity controls, the delete button, and every layer shortcut all target it. Drag a row to reorder it, or drop it onto a folder row to move it inside; folders collapse and expand with the triangle at their left edge, and a folder's eye hides everything inside it at once. Folders never nest — a folder always sits at the top level of the stack.

Creating, duplicating, merging

The strip at the bottom of the panel:

• New Layer — adds a transparent layer above the current selection and selects it, ready to paint.
• New Folder — adds an empty folder. Drag layers onto it to fill it.
• Delete — removes the selected layer or folder. Deleting a folder asks for confirmation first, because it deletes everything inside it and cannot be undone.

Right-click any layer row for the rest:

• Duplicate Layer — an exact copy directly above the original.
• Merge Down — composites the layer into the one beneath it, baking in its blend mode and opacity. Not offered on the lowest layer (there is nothing beneath it but Base).
• Flatten Image — composites the entire stack into a single layer.

Paint strokes into layers are undoable like any other stroke (Ctrl+Z), but structural operations are not — delete, Merge Down and Flatten are permanent. If you might want the un-merged version back, Duplicate the layers first.

Blend mode & opacity

The Mode dropdown and Opacity slider (0–100%) above the list edit the selected layer. Base is fixed at Normal / 100%. The full mode list is the familiar Photoshop set, in the same order:

Normal · Darken · Multiply · Color Burn · Linear Burn · Darker Color · Lighten · Screen · Color Dodge · Linear Dodge (Add) · Lighter Color · Overlay · Soft Light · Hard Light · Vivid Light · Linear Light · Pin Light · Hard Mix · Difference · Exclusion · Subtract · Divide · Hue · Saturation · Color · Luminosity

One exception: layers in a Normal-channel stack have no mode to choose — the Mode box reads Detail. Normal-map vectors don't survive colour arithmetic, so each layer's bumps are added to the ones beneath instead, as if their height maps were stacked: a flat part of a layer leaves the normal map below exactly as it was, and Opacity fades a layer's bumps out. Merging a normal layer down keeps the look, and a group's normal layers add up the same way as loose ones.

Keyboard shortcuts

The Layers group in Settings > Keyboard Setting (all rebindable). They act exactly like clicking the panel's own controls — on the selected layer of the stack the panel is currently showing — and therefore only fire while the Layers window is actually open. With Base selected they do nothing.

Action	Default	Does
New Layer	Ctrl+Shift+N	New transparent layer above the selection
Duplicate Layer	Ctrl+J	Copy of the selected layer
Group Layers	Ctrl+G	New folder with the selected layer inside it
Ungroup Layers	Ctrl+Shift+G	Dissolves the selected folder, keeping its contents in place
Merge Selected Layers	Ctrl+Shift+E	Merge Down on the selected layer

(Rest Mesh on Ground moved to Shift+G to free Ctrl+G for Group Layers — an existing custom Ctrl+G binding for it is migrated forward automatically.)

Memory footprint

Every layer is a full-resolution image in RAM. The footer readout — Layers: ~N MB — totals every layer across both meshes, not just the stack on screen, and turns amber past 512 MB and red around 1 GB. When it climbs, Merge Down or Flatten stacks you've finished with; the flattened result costs the same as one layer.