News
Open Painter is now open source
Open Painter is free software under the GNU GPL. The complete Blender extension and its native engine are on GitHub, with a 0.15.0 release for macOS and Linux.
In this article
Open Painter is now free and open source. The complete Blender extension is on GitHub under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later: texture sets, layers and masks, baking, smart materials, Open Graph, export, and the native engine that runs them.
Use it for any project, personal or commercial. Read the code, change it, and share your changes under the same license. What you make with Open Painter is yours.
Here is what that means for your work, what the repository contains, and what is new in this release.
What open source means for your work
The license covers the software, not what you make with it. Paint a client’s product, texture a game’s props or sell your own materials: the textures, materials, renders and scenes you create are yours, on any terms you choose. Open Painter costs nothing, for individuals and studios alike.
You can also change Open Painter itself. Fix a bug, add a feature, adapt it to your pipeline. If you give a modified version to someone else, the GPL asks you to share its source under the same license, so the next person can build on it too. Packs from the Materials+ library keep their own Materials+ License.
What’s in the repository
Everything the extension needs. The Python add-on brings 50 smart materials with master controls, 18 smart masks, procedural sources, filters, mesh-map baking with a pre-bake check, and export presets for Blender, Unreal Engine 5 and Unity. Alongside it sits libopenpainter, a portable C library that schedules the engine’s work on the GPU and runs export, baking and painting kernels on the CPU. Its vector paths for Apple silicon and Intel are tested to give exactly the same results as the reference code.
The test suites come with it, from unit tests to real Blender sessions, and every change is built on macOS, Windows and Linux.
What’s in 0.15.0
0.15.0 is the first open-source release. Pick the zip for your computer on the download page: macOS on Apple silicon or Intel, Windows, Linux, or a zip that runs anywhere on the Python implementation. Each platform zip includes the native engine; the any-platform zip gives the same results, more slowly.
The native engine now runs on every platform. One C core drives Metal, Vulkan and OpenGL, and gives the same results on Apple silicon and Intel. Smart materials gain surface optics: index of refraction, transmission, subsurface scattering and sheen. Deep layer stacks stay interactive, because an edit re-renders only what it changes, and undo is faster. Export is faster too, with the same pixels as before.
Free, with optional services
Open Painter stays free. Two optional services support its development: Materials+, a maintained library of editable smart materials, and Teams, shared libraries for studios and groups. Neither is needed to paint, bake or export. You can also support Open Painter directly with a donation; see ways to support.
Build it with us
Report a bug or suggest a feature on GitHub. Pull requests are welcome; the contributing guide explains how to build and test. Please report security issues privately through the repository’s security policy.
Open Painter Studio, a free desktop app built on the same material model, is available for Mac on the download page.
Written by Open Painter
We build Open Painter so you can paint, age and finish materials in the Blender scenes you create.
