by Warcat Studio·Rendering
Illustrative cover generated by AnyPlugins — no product screenshot available.
PaintKit earns its place in the Superhive library for spanning both the shader editor and geometry nodes to build painterly looks, with results that can be baked out for any render engine.
PaintKit is a Blender toolset focused on stylized 'painterly' rendering. It includes a growing variety of procedural group tools that live in both the shader editor and the geometry nodes graph, letting artists create paint-like textures and effects on their objects.
The geometry nodes side generates cards across a mesh that can be textured to give the appearance of brushstrokes, with controls for noise displacement, size, aspect ratio, and framerate. A Guided Brushstrokes tool (in Beta) lets you dictate the flow of brushstroke instances by drawing guide curves on an object's surface. SimpleShell offers a simpler, more performance-friendly approach, creating layers of the original object that can then be masked and textured using the SimpleShell nodegroup.
Because PaintKit uses normal offsetting techniques alongside procedural textures, it works in both Eevee and Cycles, and results can be baked to texture maps for use in any render engine. The kit also bundles custom shaders and nodegroups, including groups to fix shading errors from brushstroke objects and three unique paint-like procedural textures. Documentation and a video tutorial are provided by the developer.
Paintkit is best for blender artists building stylized, painterly textures and brushstroke effects for their projects.
Paintkit is completely free to download and use.
PaintKit works in both Eevee and Cycles. It uses normal offsetting techniques alongside procedural textures, and anything you create can be applied and baked to texture maps for use in any render engine. This means the painterly results are not locked to a single renderer, so brushstroke and paint-like textures made in Blender can be carried into other pipelines through baked maps. The listing notes a Blender version of 4.0.
The Guided Brushstrokes tool in PaintKit lets you dictate the flow of brushstroke instances. You create guide curves by drawing a new curve on your object's surface, then generate your brushstrokes with that curve set as the guide. It is currently marked as Beta. If you prefer a lighter approach, PaintKit also includes SimpleShell, a more performance-friendly method that creates masked and textured layers of the original object using the SimpleShell nodegroup.
PaintKit's geometry nodes tools generate cards across the mesh, which can then be textured to give the appearance of brushstrokes. The brush generation options include extra controls such as noise displacement, size and aspect ratio, and framerate adjustments. Alongside these, PaintKit bundles custom shaders and nodegroups for shading and texture adjustments, including groups to fix shading errors from brushstroke objects and three unique paint-like procedural textures.
PaintKit is listed as free in this catalog, and it is distributed under the GPL license. For current licensing and pricing details, check the developer's page. The listing notes a Blender version of 4.0, so you'll want a compatible Blender release to use the toolset. Documentation and a video tutorial are available from the developer to help you get started with the shader editor and geometry nodes tools.
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