Beschreibung
Paint textures inside Unreal: color, flowmaps, direction, masks and normals, on a mesh or a flat canvas.
In-engine texture painter for UE 5.4–5.8. Five paint modes, Flipbook Studio for animated textures, and seam-dilated PNG and EXR export.
Documentation Page
Paint in the engine. Stop round-tripping.
Painting Lab is a texture painter that lives inside the Unreal Editor. Paint straight onto a static mesh, through its UVs or a triplanar projection, or switch to a flat 2D canvas for sprites and masks. When you export, the texture is already in your project: no trip out to another app and back.
Everything you paint is stored in one Painting Lab asset that holds the whole texture set, so your work is saved with the project like any other asset.
▸ Five paint modes
Color — ordinary RGBA painting, with each channel switchable on and off.
Flow — the direction of your stroke is written into the texture. Drag the brush the way the water should run and you have a flowmap for water, lava, cloth or hair, drawn rather than computed.
Direction — paint tangent directions for anisotropic materials such as brushed metal and hair. You comb the direction in with the brush.
Mask — per-channel masks with your own channel names. Call the channels Rust, Wetness, Damage and Edge Wear, and whoever wires up the material later knows exactly what each one holds.
Normal — paints a tangent-space normal that pushes outward from the stroke, for quick embossed bevels and details.
▸ Flipbook Studio
Turn any texture into a frame-by-frame animation. Add, duplicate, delete and reorder frames, and paint each one over onion-skin ghosts of up to three frames on either side. Play the loop back on the canvas at 1 to 60 frames per second, looping, ping-pong or once. Starter presets set up common loops in one click.
When it's done, export it as a sprite-sheet atlas laid out for Niagara SubUV and the material Flipbook node, together with a ready-made preview material, or as a numbered PNG or EXR frame sequence.
▸ Brushes
• Tools: paint, erase, smooth, fill and hatching (parallel ink lines; cross them to shade)
• Brush tips: stamp any grayscale texture, with invert and threshold. 20 starter tips are included.
• Dynamics: angle, size, scatter and opacity jitter, each driven by random, stroke direction or fade
• Symmetry: mirror across X, Y or both, or radial with a segment count you choose
• Lazy mouse stabilizes an unsteady hand; Shift-drag commits a straight line
• Eyedropper with Ctrl-click, in the 3D viewport and on the canvas
• Brush presets: save the whole brush as an asset and load it into any Painting Lab asset
• A palette of up to 24 swatches, stored with the asset
▸ Texture sets and templates
One asset holds as many textures as you need, each with its own resolution (256 to 4096), paint mode and channel names. Two one-click templates set up common sets: PBR Standard (BaseColor, Normal, Roughness, Metallic, AO) and VFX Pack (mask, flowmap, direction). A gradient ramp fills a texture from one colour to another, and you can load an existing texture to paint corrections on top of it.
▸ See it on the mesh as you paint
In 3D mode the painted result shows on the mesh live, through a built-in preview material or your own. Point it at your own master material and painted textures bind to parameters with matching names.
▸ Export that is ready to use
Each export writes two things: a Texture2D asset next to your Painting Lab asset, and an image file on disk. PNG is 8-bit, sRGB for colour and linear for data; EXR is 16-bit float for flow and direction vectors. Auto-detect picks the right one per paint mode.
Every export also runs four passes of seam dilation, bleeding paint across UV island borders, so you don't get dark halos at the edges once mipmaps are generated. It works on a copy, so your painting is untouched.
▸ Where it fits, honestly
Painting Lab is for the texture work that suffers most from round-trips: flowmaps, channel masks, direction maps, VFX sprites and quick fixes on an existing texture.
It is not a Substance Painter replacement. There is no layer stack: paint goes straight into the texture. It doesn't paint landscape weight maps; Unreal's landscape tools do that. And triplanar painting is a rescue for meshes without usable UVs, not a substitute for them.
▸ Painting Lab or EQLabs Pro?
Painting Lab is also part of EQLabs Pro, and since version 2.1.0 the two are the same tool, feature for feature. Buy the standalone if painting is all you need. If you also want the other 121 EQLabs tools, Pro includes Painting Lab.
▸ Technical details
• Engine versions: UE 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8
• Type: editor-only plugin. Nothing from it ships in your packaged game, and the textures you export are ordinary textures that work on every platform.
• Platform: Windows editor only
• Plugin dependencies: none
• Documentation and support: eqlabs.studio/plugins/painting-lab
▸ FAQ
Does it replace Substance Painter?
No. Substance Painter still wins for layered, smart-material texturing. Painting Lab covers the jobs where leaving the engine costs you the most: flowmaps, masks, direction maps and quick fixes.
Does it work on macOS or Linux?
No. The editor module is Windows-only. The textures you export work on any platform.
Will it add anything to my shipped game?
No. It is an editor tool with no runtime module.
Can I use my own brush tips?
Yes. Any imported grayscale texture works as a brush tip, with invert and threshold controls.
Are updates included?
Yes. Buy once, and future updates are included.
═══ FEATURE BULLETS (10) ═══
• Paint on a static mesh (UV or triplanar) or a flat 2D canvas
• Five paint modes: Color, Flow, Direction, Mask and Normal
• Flipbook Studio: frame-by-frame animation with onion skin and playback
• Sprite-sheet atlas export with a ready preview material, or PNG and EXR frame sequences
• Paint, erase, smooth, fill and hatching tools with symmetry and jitter dynamics
• Brush tips, 20 starter tips and saveable brush presets
• Named mask channels and PBR Standard and VFX Pack templates
• Live preview on the mesh as you paint
• Seam-dilated PNG and EXR export, as an asset and a file
• UE 5.4 to 5.8