Is Substance Painter free? Adobe's offers and the free alternatives for painting your textures

Painting a texture directly onto a 3D model, with layers, masks and materials that wear away on the edges: that is the job of Substance 3D Painter, Adobe's texture painting software. But for most users the tool is not free, and the same question keeps coming up: is there a free Substance Painter? This guide sums up Adobe's offers, checked on its official pages, then presents the free or open source alternatives, their licence and what they can do.

Is Substance 3D Painter free?

Not for everyone. Substance 3D Painter belongs to Adobe and is part of the Substance 3D range, along with Designer, Sampler and Stager. The only free offer is the Education licence, reserved for students and teachers in higher education; every other way of getting it is paid for:

The version sold on Steam is a perpetual licence: you keep the software, but the new features released after its update period ends do not reach you. According to its Steam page, it includes neither unlimited access to the Substance 3D Assets library nor the generative AI features, which are reserved for Adobe's own offers. Terms and prices are given on the Adobe and Steam pages; they change, so check them before buying.

What Painter puts forward: smart materials that adapt to the shape of the object, wear added with particles, painting across several texture sets or UDIMs, and exporting maps in the format each engine expects. This is the list to judge the alternatives against.

What you need to paint textures

Before comparing tools, here is what texture painting software has to do to replace Painter on a real project:

• Paint on the model in 3D, not just on a flat image.
• Paint several maps at once: a "rust" brush stroke should change the colour, the roughness and the relief at the same time.
• Work with layers and masks, so that you can go back to one layer without repainting the rest.
• Bake starting maps from the model: ambient occlusion, curvature, normals from a detailed model. They serve as masks to put dirt in the crevices and wear on the edges.
• Export clean PBR maps to the renderer or the game engine.

All of these steps need a properly unwrapped model: the UV mapping entry (in French) explains unwrapping, and the guide on UDIMs how to spread a large model over several images.

Painting for free in Blender with Texture Paint

Blender is free and open source, and it includes a texture painting mode. The principle: the unwrapped model receives an image, and each brush stroke in the 3D Viewport is carried over to that image through the UVs. You can also paint flat in the Image Editor, and both views update together.

1. Unwrap the model. Without UVs, Blender shows a warning; the Add Simple UVs button does a quick unwrap, but a careful unwrap is still better.
2. Open the Texture Paint workspace, which puts the 3D Viewport in Texture Paint mode and the Image Editor in Paint mode.
3. Choose where to paint in the Texture Slots panel: in Material mode, Blender lists the images of the material and you click the one to paint; in Single Image mode, you pick any image. The New button creates a blank image.
4. Paint with the brushes in the toolbar.
5. Save the image: it is not saved automatically with the file. The Save All Images button saves every modified image.

The manual recommends square images whose side is a power of two (1024, 2048…) for smooth painting. The limit for anyone coming from Painter: Texture Paint paints into one image at a time, the one in the active slot. To stack layers, you have to assemble them yourself in the material's nodes, with mix nodes and masks. That is exactly what Ucupaint automates. The basics of Texture Paint mode, UVs and colour spaces are covered in the guide to Blender textures.

Ucupaint: painting layers in Blender

Ucupaint is a free add-on, released under the GPL 3.0 licence, that manages texture layers for EEVEE and Cycles. It sits in the sidebar of the 3D Viewport and of the Shader Editor, in the Ucupaint tab. What it brings, according to its page on the Blender extensions platform:

• Layers and masks that stack images, vertex attributes or generated textures.
• Custom channels: colour, roughness, metallic, normal… you add or remove the ones you need.
• Layer modifiers, such as a colour ramp or a maths operation, to make adjustments without repainting.
• A single node group that holds the whole stack and plugs into any other node of the material.
• Baking: ambient occlusion, normals from another object or from a multiresolution model and, since version 2.4.9 of July 2026, curvature, thickness and wireframe.
• Export: each final channel is baked to an image, and several channels can be packed into a single image, for example an ORM map or a normal map in DirectX format.
• UDIMs, detected from the UV islands, and real-time displacement.

Installation. On Blender 4.2 and later, open Edit, Preferences, Get Extensions, search for "Ucupaint" and install it. For an older version (the add-on goes back as far as Blender 2.76), download the archive that matches your version from the Releases page of its GitHub repository, then install it from the Add-ons section of the preferences. A Plus version is offered to people who support the development; the free version contains the features described here.

Workflow. On an unwrapped object, create the Ucupaint setup from the sidebar tab, add the channels you want, then stack the layers: a base material, a layer of dirt masked by ambient occlusion, a layer of wear masked by curvature, and hand-painted touch-ups. When the result is right, bake the channels to images to freeze the material or export it. To go further with baking in Blender, see our tutorial on texture baking (in French).

Other free or open source software

Material Maker is standalone software, built on the Godot engine and released under the MIT licence. At its core is a node editor for creating procedural materials, exported as PBR maps for Godot, Unity or Unreal Engine, and therefore for Blender too. It offers a tool for painting 3D models with procedural brushes, which its own website describes as experimental. Version 1.7, from July 2026, can be downloaded for free for Windows, Linux and macOS from its GitHub repository.

ArmorPaint is standalone PBR texture painting software, with node-based materials, fill layers, GPU-accelerated baking and a live link module for Blender. Its source code is published under the zlib licence and can be compiled freely; the ready-to-install versions for Windows, Linux and macOS, on the other hand, are paid for. It is therefore only free for those willing to compile it.

Which tool for which need?

• You already model and render in Blender: Texture Paint for simple touch-ups, Ucupaint as soon as you need layers. Everything stays in the same file, with no export or reimport.
• You want repeatable materials generated with nodes: Material Maker, then import the maps into Blender.
• You want separate painting software, linked to Blender, and are willing to compile it or pay for it: ArmorPaint.
• Your studio or your client works with Substance files: the 30-day trial, or the free Education licence if you are a student, lets you learn the software before buying it.

Bringing the textures back into Blender

Whatever the tool, the result is a set of PBR maps: colour, roughness, metallic, normal, sometimes height and occlusion. In Blender, the colour map stays in sRGB, all the other maps are set to Non-Color, and the normal map goes through a Normal Map node set to the right convention, OpenGL by default. The tutorial on PBR textures in Blender (in French) connects each map step by step. And if you would rather start from ready-made materials, the guide to free 3D textures presents libraries under the CC0 licence.