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Sculpting and Painting

The Sculpting menu set is the umbrella for surface-altering work: brush-painted color, brush-painted masks, smudge, blur, fill, and the eraser. The big-six toolbox entries here are Brush, Erase, Fill, Eyedrop, Pen, and Bezier.

This section covers the operating model: when to paint, when to sculpt, and how the painted result becomes part of the .esk.

Two surfaces, one canvas

The Designer paints into one of two surfaces, chosen automatically by what is selected:

Selection Paint target
Image placement The image's RGBA pixels (destructive)
Mesh3D placement The mesh's albedo texture (destructive)
Path / Rectangle / Ellipse / Region The placement's mask (additive)
Nothing selected The active layer or a default scratch layer

Mask-painting is the gentle path: it does not modify the placement's color, just its alpha. Albedo-painting is destructive but produces real surface paint.

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The actual brush mechanics (six engines, 30 presets, dynamics, imports) live in the Brush system section.

When to paint vs not

Paint when:

  • You want hand-tuned highlights or shadows that no algorithm can produce.
  • You are localizing a texture transfer's result (the bake gave you 90% of the way; brush touches up the last 10%).
  • You are authoring custom masks for a render-part workflow.

Skip painting and reach for a transfer pipeline when:

  • You can describe the result as "warp this image to fit this geometry". Use Texture transfer pipelines.
  • You can express the result as a procedural texture (elysium.render.texture shaders) or a Photoshop-style filter (Magic Polish).

Layer model

The Designer is layer-aware: each placement carries up to 8 paint layers, each with its own opacity, blend mode, and visibility toggle. The Properties pane's Layers section is the editor. Painting always writes into the active layer (highlighted in the layer list).

For most authoring you will use one layer per placement. Multi- layer workflows are common when:

  • Iterating on a destructive edit (work on a new layer; toggle off if it does not work out).
  • Mixing brush styles for a single look (oil base + watercolor glaze + final detail in Round Stamp).

See also