Paint While Sculpting

Paint while sculpting makes one stroke do two jobs: as the brush moves the surface, it also lays colour and material values onto the points it reaches. The paint is shaped by the same falloff, brush image and stencil as the sculpt dab and held back by the same mask, and the whole stroke — shape and paint together — is undone with a single Ctrl+Z.

Turning it on

The switch sits in the Sculpt palette under the brush controls: an icon and a Paint while sculpting checkbox beside it — either one flips the same setting. It is off every time the app starts and is not saved, so a session always begins with plain sculpting.

The same switch also appears at the end of Brush Settings in the Paint palette while you are painting the mesh’s points. From there it works the other way round: Paint Brush strokes also sculpt, using the tool and Intensity chosen in the Sculpt tab.

What it paints

The stroke paints whichever channels are ticked in the Paint palette, each at its own value and strength:

• Color / Albedo
• the greyscale channels — Metallic, Roughness, and, where the material has them, Alpha, Height (bump) and Displacement
• Emission

The two strengths stay separate: Intensity sets how far the surface moves, and each channel’s strength sets how strongly it paints. Hover the switch to see exactly which channels the next stroke will paint.

The Normal Map channel is never painted by these strokes. If it is the only channel ticked, the stroke sculpts and paints nothing.

Foreground & background colours

With the switch on, a line of colour controls appears under it:

• the foreground swatch is the Paint palette’s Color / Albedo — the same colour, and the same swatch history;
• the swap button exchanges foreground and background;
• the background swatch is painted where the brush image is black, while Enable BG paint is ticked, blending into the foreground through the image’s greys. It needs a brush image — the plain round brush has no black to fill;
• an eye-dropper beside each swatch picks that colour from the model with your next click (in the Sculpt tab, that click sculpts nothing).

The line is greyed out while Color / Albedo is unticked in the Paint palette.

Where the paint goes

The paint lands on the mesh’s points, not on its textures. It works on both the Loaded Mesh and the Generated Mesh, whichever is on screen. A channel that has vertex-paint layers receives the paint on its active layer, exactly as a Paint-tab vertex stroke would; otherwise it goes into the mesh’s own vertex colours and material values.

To see the colour, turn on Show Vertex Colors (V by default). PBR Preview, when it is on, takes priority over that toggle.

Limits

When the switch is on but the next stroke will not paint, the reason appears in amber under it. The cases are:

• Grab Brush, Rotate Brush and Mask only sculpt — they have no dab to paint along.
• No channel is ticked in the Paint palette (or only the Normal Map is).
• With Dynamic topology on, channels that have vertex-paint layers are not painted yet — untick them, or turn Dynamic topology off.

From the Paint palette, strokes only sculpt as well with the Paint Brush tool, while painting the points, and not while Realtime Subdividing is on — the view then shows a subdivided copy of the model.