While it almost every other industry seems to be trying to copy the Adobe subscription model these days, the good news is that it might be the best time ever for artists who want to build their workflows around free creative tools. Open-source Blender is well established for 3D modelling and animation, and we now have free After Effects alternatives in Maxon's Autograph and Canva's Cavalry.
But although Blender can be used for texturing, most 3D artists I speak to use Adobe Substance 3D Painter. It's faster, more specialised and better integrated into professional pipelines. However, a new Substance 3D Painter alternative is showing a lot of promise. Open-source ArmorPaint is lightweight and now available for whatever platform you might want to work on.
Developed by Lubos Lenco and the team behind the open-source game engine Armory3D, ArmorPaint has been in early access for eight years. Version 1.0 has finally been released into the wild, and it's available to download for Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android (the latter two being experimental for now).
The app allows real-time texture painting in a path-traced 3D viewport and can be used to generate PBR texture maps ready for use in the best 3D modelling software, animation software or game engines as PNG, JPEG or EXR at up to 32-bit colour depth. Assets can be brought in via the usual formats or as Blender scene files, and materials can be created via a node-based material editor or by importing PBR texture maps.
The app has a custom-built 3D engine and 2D drawing system and supports ray tracing via Direct3D 12, Vulkan, Metal, and WebGPU graphics interfaces. Recent updates have added Decimate, Smooth, Bevel, and Subdivide modifiers for mesh editing, a basic UV map editor, Neural Nodes for generative AI features, photo-to-material generation, skinning animation playback and support for tween animations.
A code rewrite in C allows interactive painting on bigger 3D assets, with more texture layers at higher resolution. A clean up of the codebase has also slashed the program's size. Armory's team says it could now fit on two 1.44MB floppy disks.
On desktop, it runs as a sub- 10MB portable application with no installation and near-instant start up (you might want one of the best laptops for 3D modelling or the best graphics cards). There are also plugins for Blender, Unity and Unreal Engine.
See the videos below for walk through on some of the recent updates. You can download the free texture painting software from ArmorPaint.org.
