The developer of the add-on for Blender describes Paint System as "a simple yet flexible drawing system for non-photorealistic rendering in Blender" – in the video above, he explains that it was inspired by the artistic design of the Netflix animated series *Arcane*. This allows users to draw directly on the surface of 3D geometry using a variety of preset brushes: the add-on supports brushes included in the Blender Essentials asset tool library. Drawing is done layer by layer, with support for layer opacity, layer masking, and, starting with the latest version of Paint System 1.1.6, corrective layers.
Paint System also supports layer blending modes similar to Photoshop, including Hue, Saturation, Value, Multiply, Divide, Lighten, and Darken. However, one of the most appealing features is the Erase Alpha function, which makes this part of the layer transparent, allowing users to "erase" parts of the object by painting over them, as shown above.
The advantage of Paint System seems to be its ease of use: it features a simple, intuitive user interface and is designed so that users don’t have to manipulate Blender’s shader nodes. However, artists who wish to delve deeper into node-based graphics can achieve even more results. By adjusting the connections between node groups that the Paint System creates in the rest of the material network, users can paint texture channels other than surface color, including normal maps.
Paint System is compatible with Blender 4.1 and higher. It is available for free download, and the source code is licensed under GPL v3.