Blender 3D Paint & Effect tools in 2.5

The above picture was painted with the new 3D paint texturing tools directly onto the 3D mesh itself!

It's about time to bring a little Blender 2.5 development news again, and I can tell you - it's getting big! We're getting more node tools for the compositor, and new 3D paint tools to the now very speedy 3D Texture Paint mode.

In the above picture you can see how the HUE editor works, it's very intuitive and you can easily adjust the color balance in your entire image, movie or post-pro work just by adjusting the curves.

3D Paint toolbox:

It's literally raining gifts, as you can see in the above image, there's a lot of extras in the 3D paint toolbox. For those of you that doesn't know the 3D texture paint mode - it's a real-time mini paintbox where you can paint DIRECTLY onto your 3D models - either in the 3D viewport or on a 2D surface, and instantly watch the changes.

UPDATE: Demo video here   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R_65BvL_bw

Shown above:

- User defined brushes.
- Color selector (You can select a different one in the user prefs.)
- Brush Texture menu (works the same way as the Sculpt texture selector we got earlier.)

As you can see from the above image, you can spot some of the earlier paint functions from the various menues we had before, now nicely collected in the toolshelf which has collapsable menues for easy hiding of those things you don't instantly need.

Etc.:

- Draw, Clone, Smear & Soften
- Airbrush, og spacing
- A new curve editor to edit the hard/softness of your brush
- Projection painting menu, which will help you control the texture paint bleeding between the UV islands and other features as indicated.

These things used to be spread all over the place, but no longer - you now have easy access to control it all in one simple toolpanel.

Blenders projection paint is really getting good, you still need to map your characters properly, but when you've done that, it's a smooth process to paint and texture directly onto even complex characters in Blender 2.5, and you won't see the ugly seams anymore, if you do - you have the tools to control it. I've tested this, and it's smooth sailing - really - you're in for a treat. The entire painting process is fast and responsive.

Other news:

The devs are working on a new shading interface these days, this will probably break backwards compatibility, but the general feel from the community and the devs, is that this is worth sacrificing in order to make Blender more accessible to various render engines.

It'll make it much easier to integrate with other render engines such as V-Ray, Mental Ray & renderman compliant renderes - in other words...it'll be easier to make the features available from the various render engines, available to Blender users simply by pipelining it so well - that all the features COULD become available in Blenders own menues - and thus improving your workflow, and that you don't have to comprimise on Blenders existing shaders VS the new render engines.