Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making

Texture Painting

Also called 3D painting, surface painting, projection painting

Painting colour and material straight onto a model's surface, projected through its UVs or into a volume, rather than into a flat image that must then be mapped. The seams and the stretch are still underneath: painting in 3D hides them from the painter, not from the renderer.

A UV layout of three islands over a texel checker — front, side, and back — carrying one brush stroke that is continuous on the model. It appears here as three separate bands, one per island, because every seam breaks it; and on the half-width side island the same stroke lands at half the width, 0.25 against 0.50, so it is painted at half the texels. Dashed lines pair the seam borders that were one edge before the cut.

In practice

The real shift is that modern tools paint every channel at once — albedo, roughness, metalness, height — not that the viewport is 3D. Painting a highlight into albedo remains the oldest mistake in the trade, and a 3D viewport makes it easier to commit, not harder.

Not to be confused with

How this term connects

AlbedoDiffuse mapSculptingTexel DensityTexture BakingUV SeamUV UnwrapTexture Painting
Related Confused with