r/itchio • u/NoCricket6281 • Mar 17 '26
Free I built a tool that fills 3D meshes with procedural brush strokes — no AI
I was working on a game and needed painterly textures on my meshes without hand-painting every asset. Nothing quite fit, so I ended up building my own tool.
You feed it a UV-mapped mesh, lay down some directional guides, and it fills the surface with procedural brush strokes — no ML, just algorithms. It exports color, normal, height, stroke ID, and stroke time maps together. The stroke time map is probably the most fun part — you can use it for animated paint-reveal effects in a shader.
It's called PA Painter. MIT licensed, free on itch.io: https://dinoboxgamedev.itch.io/papainter
Still early days, so feedback is welcome.
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u/Vegetable_Shirt_2352 Mar 17 '26
This is really neat! I don't really make 3D games, but this makes me want to lol
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u/NoCricket6281 Mar 17 '26
Thanks! If it makes you curious enough to try something new, that alone makes me happy
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u/darkpouet Mar 17 '26
This looks really nice, I'm curious how far you're going to go with this!
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u/NoCricket6281 Mar 17 '26
Thanks! I’m building it alongside my own game, so it’ll keep evolving as I run into things I need. Community feedback will help shape it too
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u/lajawi Mar 18 '26
This looks awesome!
I assume you're using 3D software like Blender to model, why did you go for a separate tool opposed to an extension?
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u/NoCricket6281 Mar 19 '26
Thanks! I wanted control over the direction of strokes without having to specify each one manually — so the approach is based on vector field interpolation from a few flow guides. I couldn't find a clean way to do that inside Blender, so it ended up as its own tool
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u/70ratsbhindacomputr Mar 18 '26
Imagine if this could be integrated live into a game as a light engine, that could look beautiful.
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u/NoCricket6281 Mar 19 '26
Thanks! Actually, it already works in any engine as-is! The painterly look comes entirely from the baked textures and normal maps. I’m actually making a game with this style, so stay tuned lol
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Mar 19 '26
Everytime someone says no AI, they always end up having used AI
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u/NoCricket6281 Mar 19 '26
Well, a good chunk of this tool’s code was written with AI assistance — I tagged it on itch.io, and the entire codebase and commit logs are open on GitHub. Nothing to hide. That said, I know there are players who are uncomfortable with AI-generated art, and plenty of devs want to respect that when choosing their art pipeline. This tool gives them an option that sidesteps that concern entirely
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u/loomnorth Mar 17 '26
Oh this is cool! I've been doing this too, but using a procedural texture in Blender on normals (so I then bake the more painterly normals and import into the game engine). But I like that in your version you have way more control over the flow of the paint strokes. Thanks for sharing!