Blender Master Class

Texturing in GIMP

While we can paint in 2D in Blender, GIMP offers a much wider array of painting tools, such as selections, masks, layers, and filters. This variety of tools makes GIMP (or another image editor, such as Photoshop) indispensable for working on textures. In particular, the ability to work with layers makes it much easier to create textures as nondestructively as possible, building up one layer and then adding details in a new layer over the top.

The ability to work in layers also allows you to combine baked textures with your hand-painted textures easily. For example, you can add an ambient occlusion texture over another layer of your texture map to add shadowing. GIMP also has a more advanced brush system, making it easier to ...