In the Rendering menu set, select .
You can paint textures with the 3D Paint Tool using two types of brushes: Artisan brushes and Paint Effects brushes. You can paint renderable attributes such as color, bump, transparency, and specular color on polygons, NURBS, or subdivision surfaces. You can also paint on file textures created outside the 3D Paint Tool.
Artisan brushes use grayscale images to define the brush profile (or shape). You can select from 40 predefined brush shapes, or you can create your own shapes using any image format supported by Maya. You can paint, erase and clone textures using Artisan brushes. See also Artisan.
Paint Effects brushes are defined by specific combinations of attribute settings and can be simple (like pen, pastel, oil paint, and pencil brushes) or they can simulate growth to get their look (like flowers, feathers, hair, and fire brushes). You can select the default Paint, Smear, or Blur brush to paint with, or you can select any preset brush from Content Browser or your shelves.
When you paint on a model, you actually paint on a file texture that has been assigned to the model. You can assign a file texture in Hypershade, or you can create and assign it from the 3D Paint Tool.
When you select the 3D Paint Tool, Maya checks to see if there are any file textures already assigned to the selected surfaces for the current attribute (such as color or bump maps). If any of the surfaces do not have file textures assigned, Maya prompts you to assign textures to them. Maya creates the textures, assigns them to the surfaces, names the new textures based on the current scene, shape and attribute names, and places them in a subdirectory of the current project’s 3dPaintTextures directory.
If there are existing file textures, Maya checks to see if their names match the current shape, scene and attribute names. If they do not, Maya copies the textures to the correct names. This prevents you from overwriting existing file textures, and makes it easier for the tool to keep track of the textures.
When you Assign Textures you can save the file in any of the following formats:
(Windows and Linux) Maya IFF (the default) Autodesk PIX, EPS, GIF, JPEG, RLA, SGI, SoftImage, Targa, and Tiff.
(Mac OS X) Maya IFF (the default), Windows Bitmap, JPEG, MacPaint, Photoshop, PNG, QuickDraw, QuickTime Image, Targa, SGI, and Tiff.
Important Notes:
- Displaying other surfaces significantly slows down painting. Display only the surface you are painting using Isolate Select or by hiding the other surfaces.
- On textures larger than 512 (which have to be scaled down to appear in the hardware render), sometimes darker pixels appear where there are seams in the UV mesh. These do not show in the software render.
- Changing shader assignment while in 3D Paint Tool will cause inconsistent display. Exit the 3D Paint Tool before reassigning shaders to the selected surface.
- Switching UV sets while in the 3D Paint tool gives unexpected results. Exit the tool before switching UV sets.
- When using the 3D Paint Tool in High Quality Rendering display mode, the display is not updated until the end of the stroke. This is necessary to maintain interactive painting performance.