Preparing to Paint
Before you begin painting, you must make sure of a couple of things:
The object you’re painting on has to be unwrapped; otherwise, you won’t be able to paint on it or, in the best case scenario, it will look weird.
The texture must be showing in the 3D View. Apply a material to the object, load the texture on it, and make sure you’re displaying it in the 3D View (change the display mode to Textured or Material). In the Blender Render engine, you can show the texture with the Textured Solid option discussed in Chapter 8.
In this case, if you’ve followed along with the previous chapters, Jim’s textured parts have a material already applied and they’re showing in the UV Test Grid. After you’re done unwrapping, you might go to the Texture properties and change from a UV Test Grid to a Blank Image; you can even change the texture’s name to something like “texture_base.” Also, for the resolution, use a minimum of 2048 x 2048 pixels. This way, you’ll have a black texture to start with.
Tip
Unfortunately, there is no Blender tool that will fill the whole image with a color. You may prefer to create a new image instead so you’ll have the option to select any other color as its base color.
Once you’re set up, you can start painting! Move the camera as you normally would, but if you left click and drag over the object you selected before entering Texture Paint Mode, a stroke will be placed in that part of the texture. If you go to the UV/Image Editor and set its mode to Paint, you’ll be able to paint there as well.
Tip
Texture resolution should be squared with a “power of two” number (i.e., 8 x 8, 16 x 16, 32 x 32, 64 x 64, 128 x 128, 256 x 256, 512 x 512, 1024 x 1024, 2048 x 2048, 4096 x 4096, and so on). The reason is that these resolutions use the resources on your computer a lot better than rectangular images with random sizes, and they’re called “power of two” because to jump from one resolution to the previous or the next one, you must divide or multiply by 2. Usually, it’s recommended that you work in a pretty high resolution, because you can always scale it down if needed, but scaling up means you’ll lose detail and your model won’t look right. The size you’ll finally use depends on the amount of detail you need for your model. If it’s a high-resolution model and in certain shots you’ll be seeing it from a great distance, having textures with very high resolutions won’t matter and you’ll be consuming important resources. Once the texture is created, it’s best to make different sizes of it that you can use depending on the object’s distance from the camera.