Texture like a pro.
Six maps, one material, one crate.

The camera is three gestures. Left-drag paints. Right-drag orbits. Middle-drag pans, and the scroll wheel zooms. That split is why you never accidentally orbit mid-stroke — the paint button is not the camera button.

Six channels, one material. The channel selector at the top of the side panel chooses which PBR map your strokes go into: Albedo, Normal, Roughness, Metallic, AO, Emissive. Each keeps its own independent layer stack over its own neutral base, and all six feed a single material on the model.

Isolate Channel shows the active map on its own, unshaded. Use it constantly. A roughness map that looks right on a lit model is often a mess when you look at it flat.

Albedo is base colour with no light in it. If you paint a highlight or a shadow here, it will be wrong from every other angle. Bake nothing into albedo — that is what the other maps do.

Roughness, Metallic, AO are scalar. Only brightness matters, so pick a grey. Roughness: black = mirror, white = chalk. Metallic: black = dielectric (paint, plastic, stone, rubber), white = bare metal, and almost nothing lives in between. AO: darkens crevices where ambient light would not reach.

Normal is a vector map, and you should rarely paint it by hand. The channel takes raw RGB, so brushing colour into it writes nonsense directions. Paint your surface detail as grayscale height on a layer instead — white raised, black recessed — then use Height → Normal with the strength slider to convert it into a correct tangent-space normal map. That is the whole reason the button exists.

Emissive is light the surface emits regardless of the scene. Black everywhere except the parts that glow. It is the fastest channel to overdo.

Every channel has its own stack. Adding a layer on Albedo does not add one on Roughness. Layers carry visibility, opacity and a blend mode — Normal, Multiply, Screen, Add, Overlay — and you can reorder them by dragging a row or nudging with the arrows.

A mask is a layer's own stencil. Add mask attaches a white (fully revealed) mask. Turn on Edit mask and your strokes stop painting colour and start painting the mask instead: Paint reveals, Erase hides. Because the dab shape drives it, every brush tip, falloff and smart-mask in this course can shape a mask.

Fill layers and gradients. + Fill makes a solid layer of the brush colour, and Gradient Fill lays a two-colour ramp along a direction you choose. Both are far better starting points than brushing a base by hand, and both take masks.

The eight built-in presets are Matte Plastic, Glossy Plastic, Polished Metal, Brushed Metal, Gold, Rough Stone, Rubber and Emissive Glow. Treat them as starting points to mask in and then adjust, not as finished looks.

Deleting is group-aware. Removing a material layer removes it from every channel at once, so you never end up with the roughness half of a material you thought you deleted.

Edge Wear and Cavity Dirt estimate curvature from the mesh and composite your brush colour into convex edges or concave crevices respectively. They are one click and they are the single fastest way to make an asset look used.

Bake AO computes real ambient occlusion by raycasting the mesh and writes it into the AO channel. It is synchronous — a dense mesh will make the app sit still for a moment. That is the bake working, not a hang.

When the mesh has no UVs, painting is impossible and Canvas tells you so on load. The Auto-UV menu generates them: xatlas (best quality) first, Smart (angle-based) as an alternative, and Box or Planar Top/Front/Side projections for simple shapes. Because new UVs are invisible on the model, Canvas turns on the UV Checker automatically so you can see the result.

Judge it under more than one light. The Scene tab carries the environment presets and bundled HDRIs, an exposure slider, and rotation for loaded HDRIs. Metals in particular are reflection-driven — a metal judged against one sky is not judged at all. Turn the ground plane and shadows on to see contact, and use the Shading selector to drop to Unlit (flat albedo, no lighting to hide behind) or Matcap (clay, for reading form).

Resolution is a Scene-tab setting — 1K, 2K or 4K per channel. Work at 1K or 2K and raise it near the end: changing resolution resamples every layer and clears undo history.

1. Five materials, one sphere. Rubber, gold, wet stone, painted steel, glowing panel — using only channel fills and one material layer each.
2. Grunge pass. Set the brush tip to Noise (grunge) and weather a clean asset using nothing else. Learn what the noise scale slider actually does.
3. Symmetry drill. Turn on X mirror and paint an insignia that has to line up on both sides. Then do it with radial copies.
4. Decal placement. Load Decal…, use Show placement preview, and land a label squarely on a curved surface with Occlude hidden faces on.
5. Effect modes. Take a finished texture and use only Blur, Sharpen, Dodge and Burn to improve it. No new colour.
6. Steady hand. Raise the stroke stabilizer and draw a long clean panel line freehand.