The short version
What Material Painter is and where it runs.
Material Painter paints materials onto 3D models, the job Adobe's Substance 3D Painter does for game and film artists. You get layers, smart materials and masks, mesh map baking and a node graph for building your own materials.
It's free and open source under the GPL-3.0 licence, with ready-to-run builds for Windows, Mac (one app for Apple silicon and Intel) and Linux on its releases page.
It's made by an independent developer, alla2001, and it's not made by or affiliated with Adobe.
See Material Painter on GitHubWhat Painter costs
Why a free one matters.
Adobe sells Substance 3D Painter in its Texturing plan, which went up to $24.99 a month in the US in 2025. On Steam, Substance 3D Painter 2026 is $199.99 to buy.
Adobe also gives students and teachers a free education licence, but it's for learning only and can't be used for paid work.
Your Painter projects, opened
File, Open Substance 3D Painter project.
The model
Comes across. Every mesh in the project, with its UVs and normals.
Every texture set
Comes across. Each set at its own size, up to 4096, looking the way it did in Painter when you last saved it.
The layer stack
Rebuilt. Folders and layers with their names, visibility and opacity, plus flat fills and Painter's dirt, edge wear and curvature masks as the closest Material Painter smart masks.
Procedural materials
Final look only. Material Painter can't run Adobe's .sbsar materials, generators and filters. Their result is in the flattened layer, and the rebuilt stack keeps empty placeholders with their names.
Brush strokes
Final look only. Painted strokes are in the flattened result, not as strokes you can edit.
The report
What came across. When it's done, a report lists exactly what came across and what didn't.
What it has
From the project's own README and release notes.
Smart materials and masks
Ready-made. Dozens of ready-made materials and smart mask generators for edge wear, dirt, dust, rain streaks, drips and cavity grime.
Weather bake maps
Custom bakes. Bake maps that work out what happens around the model, like fluid flow from any direction, wind exposure and erosion, and sand and snow drifts.
Free material library
About 2,900. About 2,900 free CC0 materials from Poly Haven and ambientCG, one click from the shelf. Downloads are plain image files, so nothing is locked in.
Material Designer
Node graph. A node graph of tileable textures that drives fill layers and masks, with live previews and a 3D view. Shader Maker lets you write your own nodes.
Export presets
Engines and Blender. Presets for Unreal, Unity (URP, HDRP and Built-in), Godot, glTF, Roblox and Blender, or your own channel packing.
AI agents
Off by default. An MCP server lets AI agents like Claude drive the app. It's off until you turn it on.
Worth knowing
Before you download it.
Early access
Moving fast. The project says it works and is in daily use, but it's young. Six versions came out between October 31 and November 7, so keep a copy of any project you care about.
First launch
Not signed yet. On Windows, SmartScreen may warn the first time, so choose More info, then Run anyway. On a Mac, right-click the app and choose Open the first time.
Graphics card
Most from 2016 on. It needs a graphics card with DirectX 12 on Windows, Vulkan on Linux or Metal on a Mac. 8 GB of video memory is comfortable for 4K texture sets.
SubCraft
Another free one. SubCraft is another free, open source texture painter that opens Painter projects too. Material Painter's .spp reading is adapted from SubCraft's, and credits it.
Download
Pick your computer.
Installer or portable zip
The installer adds a Start menu shortcut, and the zip runs from any folder.
Latest releaseOne app for every Mac
macOS 11 Big Sur or newer, Apple silicon or Intel. Drag it into Applications.
Latest releaseAsk an AI
Give ChatGPT or Claude this page first, so it answers from it instead of guessing.
Copy page brings the whole page with it. Or view it as Markdown.