Smart Material Studio › Hand-paint low-poly
Workflow

Hand-paint low-poly game textures in the browser

The classic stylised workflow - flat-fill a base colour, shade with multiply, pop highlights with add - works right in a browser tab. Pixel-crisp filtering, flat shading, mirror symmetry and a UV-island fill bucket, then export a textured .glb.

Why hand-paint in the browser

Low-poly and stylised assets do not need a physically-based procedural pipeline - they need a clean base colour and hand-placed shading. Smart Material Studio's 3D Painter does exactly that in the browser: pick a colour, paint it on the model, and shade it by hand, with the display modes low-poly artists expect.

The stylised workflow

  1. Fill the base colour. Pick a colour from the HSV wheel and fill the whole layer, or use the fill bucket to flat-fill one UV island at a time.
  2. Shade with multiply. Add a new paint layer set to Multiply and paint soft darker tones into the recesses - multiply keeps them tied to the base colour.
  3. Highlight with add. Add another layer set to Add and paint the light-catching edges. Additive blending gives clean, punchy highlights.
  4. Refine. Use mirror symmetry for characters, the eyedropper to resample colours, and undo/redo freely.
  5. Export. Download a textured .glb for Unity, Unreal, Godot or Sketchfab, or the base-color and packed maps as PNGs.

Display modes made for low-poly

Tablet and precision

Wacom and other pressure pens are supported - pen pressure drives brush size and flow so strokes taper naturally. A stroke stabiliser smooths shaky lines, and true object-space mirror-X paints both sides of a symmetric model at once.

Honest about what it is. This is a real browser texture painter, not a Substance 3D Painter replacement. The baked ambient occlusion is curvature-based (approximate, not path-traced), and a single brush stroke currently paints within one UV island - painting continuously across a UV seam (projection painting) is on the roadmap. For quick jobs, low-poly and stylised work, learning PBR, and no-install machines it does the job; for film/AAA-depth procedural work, keep Painter.

Paint your low-poly asset - free

Import a .glb/.obj/.stl and start hand-painting. No install.

Open the 3D Painter

Keep reading

Paint 3D models in your browser

Import a model, bake maps, paint and mask, export a textured .glb - no install.

Browser painter vs Substance Painter

An honest comparison - what the browser tool does, and where Painter still wins.

PBR channels explained

Base color, roughness, metallic, normal, height, AO - and the values that read right.

Smart Material Studio tutorial

The full walkthrough: theme to a material in Painter, step by step.

FAQ

Can I paint stylised, non-PBR textures?

Yes. Hand painting writes straight into the base colour, so you can build a fully hand-painted diffuse texture and leave roughness and metallic flat - the classic stylised look. You can still add subtle roughness variation per stroke if you want it.

Does it support drawing tablets?

Yes. Pressure-sensitive pens (Wacom and any device that reports PointerEvent pressure) drive brush size and flow. A stroke stabiliser helps with fine linework.

What engines can I export to?

The textured .glb imports into Unity, Unreal, Godot, Blender and Sketchfab. You can also download the individual PNG maps or a packed ORM set for a manual material setup.

Will the textures look crisp on a low-poly model?

Yes - switch on Pixel filtering for nearest-neighbour texels and pick a 128 or 256 map size for a deliberately low-res, hand-painted look. Flat shading previews the faceted result.