by Blender Studio·Rendering
Images © Blender Studio. Used for product review; image policy.
Brushstroke Tools comes from Blender Studio and sits at rank 43 in the blender_extensions listing. It earns a place in the library for a procedural, layer-based approach to painterly 3D brushstrokes, backed by a guided workshop, an example file and documentation.
Brushstroke Tools is an add-on from Blender Studio for a painterly 3D brushstrokes workflow, aimed at creating a variety of stylized looks for asset production. It offers an interface to create, manage and edit layers of 3D brushstrokes that are generated procedurally with an elaborate Geometry Nodes system.
There are two brushstroke layer types. Fill floods a mesh surface with brushstrokes, controlled through a wide set of parameters in the Shape panel and guided by drawing flow-direction curves or by marking flow and break edges and faces to be ignored. Draw places brushstrokes as curve geometry directly on a surface mesh, with toolbar settings such as color while drawing plus additional procedural effects in the Shape panel. Each layer's material is handled through the interface across Properties, Brush Style and Effects.
The geometry generation and rendering techniques are computationally intensive and rely on high-end hardware for a smooth workflow. A guided workshop, a fishing hut example file and documentation are available.
Brushstroke Tools is best for blender artists building painterly, stylized 3D looks for asset production who have high-end hardware for the computationally intensive geometry and rendering.
Brushstroke Tools is completely free to download and use.
Brushstroke Tools is compatible with Blender 4.2 LTS and newer. On Blender 4.2.0 to 4.2.3 you might need to restart Blender once after installing the extension so all assets become available. Brush style previews only work on Blender 4.2.4 and up. The extension also requests file permission to read and write brushstroke asset resources from and to disk. The current release listed here is version 1.2.3.
Brushstroke Tools relies on a valid UV map on your surface mesh for the fill layer to respond to drawn flow curves. If it isn't reacting, the likely cause is a missing UV map, so try a simple Auto-UV unwrap and add the fill layer again. If the fill layer instead reacts inaccurately, the surface mesh resolution is probably too low, since the flow needs a certain mesh resolution to be interpolated properly.
Brushstroke Tools uses a stylized rendering method that makes heavy use of overlapping transparent planes. In Cycles, that means a high number of transparent bounces is required for the image to resolve nicely, and when there aren't enough, black spots appear across the render. To help configure this, use the Render Setup operator in the add-on's Advanced panel. This is specific to Cycles, where the stylized look depends on those transparent surfaces resolving correctly.
Brushstroke Tools applies computationally intensive geometry generation and rendering that rely on high-end hardware. If slowdowns happen while tweaking shape parameters, that is geometry evaluation, so keeping the number of brushstrokes and their resolution low reduces the geometry to process. If orbiting the camera is slow in a static scene, that relates to Eevee, and lowering the pixels rendered helps most, for example by changing the Pixel Size in the Performance viewport settings. Samples don't help interaction, since only one sample renders then.
Brushstroke Tools is listed as free here and is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. For current licensing terms and the latest details, check the Blender Studio's page directly. The Blender Studio also offers a subscription that provides useful resources for production with Blender, and you can support their work that way, but that subscription is separate from the add-on itself.
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