ArmorPaint reaches 1.0 after eight years in early access

ArmorPaint, the open-source PBR texture painter, tagged version 1.0 on GitHub on 3 September, eight years after it first went into early access. It matters to anyone texturing characters because it is a finished, self-contained painter that ships live-link plugins for Unreal Engine, Unity and Blender, and its source costs nothing.

The headline change is not a feature. According to CG Channel's report, the application has been rewritten in C, replacing the Haxe and JavaScript codebase it grew up on, with lower memory use and better performance as the result. That fits what the tool already claimed: the desktop build is portable, needs no installer, and downloads in under 10 MB, with painting and ray-traced baking running on the GPU through Direct3D 12, Vulkan or Metal.

On top of the rewrite, 1.0 adds a basic sculpting mode with Decimate, Subdivide, Smooth and Bevel modifiers, a UV editor, timeline playback for animated characters, and path and curve layers for details such as stitching. It also introduces what the project calls Neural Nodes, which handle AI operations including image upscaling and generating a material from a photograph.

The licensing is the part worth reading twice. The source is free under the zlib licence. Compiled binaries are $19 on itch.io, with $17.99 on iOS and $19.99 on Android. Supported platforms are Windows 10 and later, Linux and macOS, plus experimental iPadOS and Android editions.

Of the new features, timeline playback is the one that changes a character workflow rather than decorating it. Texture work almost always happens on a static bind pose, and the seam that reads perfectly there is the seam that stretches across a shoulder the moment the character moves — a problem normally found two steps later, back in the engine, after the maps have been baked and imported. Painting against a moving mesh puts that discovery at the point where it is still a brush stroke rather than a re-bake.

The zlib licence is the quieter detail. It is permissive rather than copyleft, so a studio can vendor the source into its own pipeline, patch it, and ship the result without inheriting obligations. For a tool that sits between a sculpt and an engine import, being able to fix it yourself is worth more than most feature lists.