Limitations of Blender’s Texture Paint

While Blender’s Texture Paint is very cool and has a lot of options (that you should explore further, as here you’ll only see the very basics), it does have its limitations. It has no layers, for example, which is a pretty basic and very useful feature for texture painting. In fact, there is an add-on out there that tries to mimic layers, but using it is not very easy when you want to work directly with layers in your image. Also, painting over the 3D model can get a little slow sometimes, depending on how powerful your computer is.

Of course, Blender isn’t a substitute for proper 2D image editing software, but it does provide you with a set of tools that allow you to do basic texture painting. (There are some people who have even taken Blender’s painting options to the extreme and made impressive artworks with them!)

You can use Texture Paint to texture an entire character, but it depends on the character, of course, and if you feel comfortable texturing it in 3D. Instead, you might try working with 2D images, loading textures, using layers, making color corrections, adding effects, and applying masks—things that you have no access to inside Blender’s Texture Paint Mode.

That said, there are a lot of things for which Texture Paint proves really useful. It works well for creating the base for textures. Sometimes in the UVs, when you’re working only in 2D, it is difficult to see where a detail should be placed, so you have to find where it’s supposed to go in the 3D model. But because you can paint in 3D inside Blender, that’s a good opportunity to start your texture by just painting where the details should be on the surface of the 3D model, and then use that as a base for your final texture.