Paint tools in Mudbox let you apply digital paint to your high resolution 3D models. Select a paint brush, create a layer to paint on, and paint your model in the 3D View.
Two paint modes are available:
When you paint on a model in Mudbox you create one or more 2D bitmap images that are positioned on top of the base shading material. The accurate positioning of your painted images on the 3D model is based on the location of the UV texture coordinates (UVs) for the model, and the image positioning process is referred to as mapping. UV mapping correlates the pixel locations on the 2D image you paint to the surface of the 3D model.
You can tell if your model has UVs by switching to the UV View. The UV View is also useful for evaluating how your painted image looks in relation to the UV texture coordinates.
When you paint on a model in Mudbox, the paint is applied to a paint layer. Paint layers let you keep track of the 2D bitmap image(s) you create as you paint. Layers are similar to transparent pieces of acetate that let you separate paint between one layer and another. See Paint layers overview.
The bitmap images that you paint are automatically saved with your Mudbox file (.mud) in a separate sub-directory at the same location as the .mud file. This image file can be used with other 3D rendering applications such as mental ray or RenderMan.
By default, two images are saved for each layer: a background image that represents the material background color, and an image containing the information you painted.
Alternatively, you can export a selected layer and save your painted images in any of the image formats that Mudbox supports. See Image formats.
See also Save or export your work.
While image resolution (the number of pixels in both the horizontal and vertical axes) is key in determining the detail and definition in the images you create on paint layers, the color bit depth of a paint layer is also critical to consider, depending on your particular production pipeline and file output requirements.
Color bit depth refers to the number of colors that can be displayed within an image. The higher the bit depth (16 or 32 bit), the larger the color palette that can be used to represent the image. This provides the possibility of representing a much richer (and more subtle) range of shading compared to images with a lower bit depth (8 bit).
Images with higher color bit depth retain their characteristics better when edited compared to lower bit depth images in terms of the ability to adjust their brightness, color, and contrast, which can be particularly helpful when working in a production environment when the image criteria must respond to changes in design direction.
Painting with very low strength brushes produces better results when the paint layer is of a higher bit depth (16 bit floating point) compared to paint layers that are 8 bits per channel.
For a list of supported file formats and bit depths, see Paint file formats.
