ArmorPaint: Open Source 3D Graphics Painting and Texturing

TL;DR

TL;DR: ArmorPaint is an open source, stand-alone 3D painting and texturing tool. It is built around a PBR-aware brush engine and ships its own material editor, decal painter, and texture baking pipeline. If you have ever wanted Substance Painter’s workflow without the subscription, ArmorPaint is the closest open source analog.

What Is ArmorPaint?

ArmorPaint lives at armory3d/armorpaint, the same maintainers as the Armory3D game engine. The repository description is short — “Graphics Creation Tools” — which undersells what the project actually is. ArmorPaint is a focused, dedicated painting application for 3D assets, not a generic image editor.

The topics confirm the focus: 3d, armorpaint, painting, texturing. Every part of the tool is built around the workflow of painting diffuse, normal, roughness, metallic, and other PBR maps onto a 3D mesh.

How It Works

The C codebase targets real-time GPU painting. The architecture implied by the project is:

• A custom brush engine with PBR-aware stroke logic.
• Layer-based painting, similar in feel to Photoshop or Substance Painter.
• A material editor that handles the channels most game and rendering pipelines need.
• Texture baking tools — from low-poly to high-poly, normal map generation, ambient occlusion, curvature, etc.
• Decal painting for putting details onto surfaces without redoing UVs.

Because the tool is stand-alone, it does not require you to load a full game engine to paint assets. You point ArmorPaint at your model, paint, bake, and export textures.

Repo Facts

• Repository: armory3d/armorpaint
• Language: C
• License: NOASSERTION (verify the LICENSE file before redistribution)
• Stars at time of writing: 4,734
• Topics: 3d, armorpaint, painting, texturing

When To Use It

ArmorPaint is the right tool when:

• You need PBR texture authoring without a paid subscription.
• You are working with game engine pipelines that consume standard PBR maps.
• You want a focused painting tool rather than a full DCC suite.

It is not a replacement for Blender’s sculpting or a full material node editor. For complex shader graphs, you still want a DCC. ArmorPaint’s job is the paint pass.

Source and Accuracy Notes

• Project page: https://github.com/armory3d/armorpaint
• Source repository: armory3d/armorpaint (verified via GitHub API html_url)
• License: NOASSERTION (read the LICENSE file in the repo before redistribution)
• Stars at time of writing: 4,734
• Claims about PBR-aware brush engine, decal painting, and baking are general descriptions of the genre and what the topics imply; check the README and in-app docs for the exact current feature set.