layer_painter VS zui

v0.9 might have changed a thing or two, but my experiences:

- irritating camera controls, difficult to account for unit scales outside of unity/unreal expectations (good luck painting something measured in HU), overall anaemic 3d viewport

- file loads block the whole app so have fun importing 8192x8192 textures

- good luck getting the results you want out of half the tools

- layer system is truly baffling

- overall doesn't feel like an alpha but a pre-alpha. charging for the binaries isn't charging for a piece of software worth $19; it's charging to not be forced to install visual studio on your windows machine. if you are on nixos, a ready-made nix expression [1] exists to let you take it out for a spin

- armorpaint being as miserable as it was let me to discover layer painter for blender [2] which is an infinitely superior experience and you can patch things into the shader workflows you've already accounted for in blender

[1] https://github.com/Shou/nixos-configuration/blob/f64a89d4631...

[2] https://github.com/joshuaKnauber/layer_painter

If you want to set up a layering texture system like the one seen here, you can use this addon, also free.

This free Layer Paint addon will emulate similar functions in Zbrush and Substance Painter.

I am glad people are working on it!!

Have you seen Kha by any chance? It has similar goals. I find it quite awesome, but it won't gain mass adoption for a bunch of reasons. https://github.com/Kode/Kha

Someone built an immediate mode renderer on top https://github.com/armory3d/zui, which is utilised by ArmorPaint https://armorpaint.org. I also use Zui for my own bespoke 2D game engine.

I find this tech and tooling really quite amazing (just look at how little source code Zui has) given just how small the ecosystem around it is. I think Kha really illustrates what can be achievable if the lower levels have robust but simple APIs, just exposing the bare minimum as a standard for others to build upon.

For the kind of project I work on (mostly 2d games), I think it would really awesome if your framework also supported low level audio, and a variety of inputs such as keyboard, mice, and gamepads. If it also had decent text rendering support it would basically be my dream library/framework.

The immediate mode UI library (ZUI) that the developer built is also really good. I don’t think Kha or ZUI get enough recognition, and I find both of them extremely elegant and pleasant to use. It might also be surprising to know that besides a few files for specifying constants and enums, ZUI is a single file library with only around 2100 lines of code.

https://github.com/armory3d/zui

+1 for Kha. I have been getting crazy good performance with the WebGL target. I also much prefer it’s immediate mode API, as apposed to Heaps’s display list (or scene graph). I was also able to build out a full editor with this fantastic library https://github.com/armory3d/zui