Texture Painting is impossible

[CAT PRIME]

I cannot for the life of me figure out how this feature works. 9/10 it doesn't work at all and the other time I have no idea how it started.
I can't figure out how to get the materials from the property editor on the right into the UV editor on the left and vice versa. The brushes do nothing and there's a bunch of failed junk materials I don't need anymore clogging up the menus but none of the ones I actually want to use are there. Sometimes I can't even import images as for textures.

The UV is already set up and functions just fine, I don't can't get anything else to cooperate. Did I somehow corrupt the .blend file?

[Sersch]

I don't think your .blend file is corrupt, there's simply a lot that can go wrong if you don't know exactly what you are doing.

Here's a step by step guide for painting

1. Switch your viewport layout to Texture Paint. The tab is located at the top of your viewport. That is, if you have initially created your scene by pressing on File -> New -> General. If not, let me know.

2. The property menu on the right side will change to the "Active Tool and Workspace Settings". You should see a small [+] button in the "Texture Slots" category. Press the button, select BaseColor, enter a name and resolution and click OK.

3. You can now already paint on your mesh, but the texture is not visible in the Image Editor. There are three buttons at the Image Editor's top in the center: an image icon, a New button and an Open button. Press the image icon and select your newly created texture.

4. Switch the Image Editor's mode in the top left from View to Paint. You'll now be able to paint inside the Image Editor.

That's everything you have to do to paint.

What's happening under the hood

I'll explain some other things so you know how to fix broken materials and what's happening under the hood, because following a step by step guide is cool, but it's much better when you actually understand what you are doing and why.

The BaseColor texture slot you have added by clicking on that [+] button led to a number of things that you would usually have to set up manually.

1. It creates a new material and applies it to your mesh. The material will be called Material.001. It uses the default PBR shader.

2. It creates a new Image Texture slot inside that material, adds an image to it and connects it to the PBR shader node's Base Color input.

3. You can take a look at this by switching from the Texture Paint layout to the Shading layout. You'll see the material at the bottom.

How to fix broken materials

1. Every time you click on the [+] button in Texture Paint mode and create a new texture, new image texture nodes will be created. When you select them in this menu, they'll be connected in the shader editor. Right now you can't delete them in this specific menu, but you can delete them in the shader editor.

2. You might be asking yourself why you can't delete materials in the Property Editor's material menu. You click on the X and they are still available to choose from the list of materials. Materials are a type of resource, like images or brushes.

Blender handles resources in a very specific way. When you click the X on a material, it will not be deleted, but unassigned. It's no longer on this object, but it's still in memory. If no other object uses this material, you'll know by looking at the material's name in the list of available materials. If it begins with a 0, nobody uses it anymore.

As soon as a resource has no users (the resource is "orphaned"), it will be removed the next time you open the scene. So a quick way to remove orphaned resources is to save and load.

If you really need to delete something right now and don't want to unassign it manualy from every single user, hold Shift and press on the X for deletion. The resource wil be unassigned from every user by force. You'll see this take effect when you save and load.

Let me know if this helped :)

[CAT PRIME]

Originally posted by Sersch:

I don't think your .blend file is corrupt, there's simply a lot that can go wrong if you don't know exactly what you are doing.

Here's a step by step guide for painting

1. Switch your viewport layout to Texture Paint. The tab is located at the top of your viewport. That is, if you have initially created your scene by pressing on File -> New -> General. If not, let me know.

2. The property menu on the right side will change to the "Active Tool and Workspace Settings". You should see a small [+] button in the "Texture Slots" category. Press the button, select BaseColor, enter a name and resolution and click OK.

3. You can now already paint on your mesh, but the texture is not visible in the Image Editor. There are three buttons at the Image Editor's top in the center: an image icon, a New button and an Open button. Press the image icon and select your newly created texture.

4. Switch the Image Editor's mode in the top left from View to Paint. You'll now be able to paint inside the Image Editor.

That's everything you have to do to paint.

What's happening under the hood

I'll explain some other things so you know how to fix broken materials and what's happening under the hood, because following a step by step guide is cool, but it's much better when you actually understand what you are doing and why.

The BaseColor texture slot you have added by clicking on that [+] button led to a number of things that you would usually have to set up manually.

1. It creates a new material and applies it to your mesh. The material will be called Material.001. It uses the default PBR shader.

2. It creates a new Image Texture slot inside that material, adds an image to it and connects it to the PBR shader node's Base Color input.

3. You can take a look at this by switching from the Texture Paint layout to the Shading layout. You'll see the material at the bottom.

How to fix broken materials

1. Every time you click on the [+] button in Texture Paint mode and create a new texture, new image texture nodes will be created. When you select them in this menu, they'll be connected in the shader editor. Right now you can't delete them in this specific menu, but you can delete them in the shader editor.

2. You might be asking yourself why you can't delete materials in the Property Editor's material menu. You click on the X and they are still available to choose from the list of materials. Materials are a type of resource, like images or brushes.

Blender handles resources in a very specific way. When you click the X on a material, it will not be deleted, but unassigned. It's no longer on this object, but it's still in memory. If no other object uses this material, you'll know by looking at the material's name in the list of available materials. If it begins with a 0, nobody uses it anymore.

As soon as a resource has no users (the resource is "orphaned"), it will be removed the next time you open the scene. So a quick way to remove orphaned resources is to save and load.

If you really need to delete something right now and don't want to unassign it manualy from every single user, hold Shift and press on the X for deletion. The resource wil be unassigned from every user by force. You'll see this take effect when you save and load.

Let me know if this helped :)

Yeah, uh. It turned out I forgot to add a basecolor.