Philosophy:
The idea of TAM is to use the texture as the visual guide for geometry while you are painting it. This allows for concepting in 3d space with paint tools and build lowpoly models from it or make basemodels for highpoly. It's somewhat akin to sculpting except you don't use voxels, but texels and retopo is just topo-as-you-go with knife/bisect. Vertex slide + Automerge are your best friends.
When it comes to TAM, one spends most of their time working with the UV Editor to unwrap new surfaces and Texture Paint mode to paint on them. Best to keep UV sync on!
Some handy options include Contrain to image bounds and snap to pixels. If you put a 3d cursor in the corner of your texture image and snap your unwrapped uv island to it and then scale it's going to insta-shrink it due to the image bounds. Speaking of corners and the actual texture work:
TAM is best to work with a small image* because (besides perfomance benefits) while you often don't know how much space you need for your final model, you can actually grow the image space while PMS addon is active now and adjust the uv - without addon, the opposite is true - you have to use a big enough image for your garbage. *This image was known as the garbage collector because of how ugly the uvmap and texture became at the end - everything just randomly put everywhere, but since the new addon version, you can transform the garbage collectors into proper texture and uv maps with ease. Without it, it's manual work to set up a new uvmap and texture to bake to.
When it comes to TAM, one spends most of their time working with the UV Editor to unwrap new surfaces and Texture Paint mode to paint on them. Best to keep UV sync on!
Some handy options include Contrain to image bounds and snap to pixels. If you put a 3d cursor in the corner of your texture image and snap your unwrapped uv island to it and then scale it's going to insta-shrink it due to the image bounds. Speaking of corners and the actual texture work:
TAM is best to work with a small image* because (besides perfomance benefits) while you often don't know how much space you need for your final model, you can actually grow the image space while PMS addon is active now and adjust the uv - without addon, the opposite is true - you have to use a big enough image for your garbage. *This image was known as the garbage collector because of how ugly the uvmap and texture became at the end - everything just randomly put everywhere, but since the new addon version, you can transform the garbage collectors into proper texture and uv maps with ease. Without it, it's manual work to set up a new uvmap and texture to bake to.
History:
I made my first TAM between 2013-2015 with Milkshape once. Seemed like a nobrainer first guess on how to model. I always wanted 3d modeling to be more about freedom. Drawing your concept first, lining up stuff on the axis and boxmodel or god-forbid sculpting+retopology... not my cups of teas. I wanted to do everything at once. I rediscovered TAM method in 2022 but after a few trials i put it aside. 2 years later when I shifted my focus on 3d, I researched it more to make it accesible.
Tools:
PaintMeSurprised v1.9.8
The least appealing side of the TAM method is the need to repaint surfaces once their UV islands lost their original positions since pixels remain stationary on the painted image. This makes the method less scalable and dynamic.
This blender addon utilizes baking and aims to provide a seamless experience between data transfers, completely eliminating the repainting procedure. Add the image you want to map to, press Record, move, scale, unwrap, press Stop and done!
Get PaintMeSurprised addon for Blender
This blender addon utilizes baking and aims to provide a seamless experience between data transfers, completely eliminating the repainting procedure. Add the image you want to map to, press Record, move, scale, unwrap, press Stop and done!
Get PaintMeSurprised addon for Blender
Color Conjuring in Blender
Briefly, color conjuring (CC) is the art of mixing the main colors on the canvas with addition and subraction blend modes. Alternatively, other blend modes can be used instead of substraction such as multiply and grain merge.
CC is a method to freely define and modify your colors incrementaly at any given time.
The Add brushes always make the pixel lighter while the Substract ones always make it darker except if it's their own color channel. To fix that, one should use Equal to bring the value down towards black. Add/Subtract is a bit harder to control but there is no Grain Merge blend mode in Blender which would be the best blend more for CC. Other option is to subtitued it with Multiply, whatever works.
Colorize is also a handy brush, if you colorpick at your mesh, you can override color but keep values. Desaturate is similar but it was set to white.
Smooth is a very good brush to blend color together. Very valuable for mouse work. My brush pack also should have some texture masks as well to use as brush patterns.
Anyways, I love using color conjuring, so naturally, I also use it in Blender for TAM.
Get CC brush pack for Blender
CC is a method to freely define and modify your colors incrementaly at any given time.
The Add brushes always make the pixel lighter while the Substract ones always make it darker except if it's their own color channel. To fix that, one should use Equal to bring the value down towards black. Add/Subtract is a bit harder to control but there is no Grain Merge blend mode in Blender which would be the best blend more for CC. Other option is to subtitued it with Multiply, whatever works.
Colorize is also a handy brush, if you colorpick at your mesh, you can override color but keep values. Desaturate is similar but it was set to white.
Smooth is a very good brush to blend color together. Very valuable for mouse work. My brush pack also should have some texture masks as well to use as brush patterns.
Anyways, I love using color conjuring, so naturally, I also use it in Blender for TAM.
Get CC brush pack for Blender
TAM examples: