Hello everyone! Today we are going to learn how can you paint using a “Vertex Paint” method on meshes using Blender 2.79 version.
Let’s get started!
- Vertex Paint - What is it for and why do you use it?
Vertex Paint is a “method” which allows users to manually colorize the specific mesh. It mostly allows you to create a manual texture by painting on the mesh, but sometimes it’s really useful. When a vertex on the specific mesh is painted, the color of the vertex will be modified according to the settings of the brush.
The color of all visible planes and edges attached to the vertex are then modified with a gradient to the color of the other connected vertices. You also need to note that a face on the mesh won’t be modified.
- Rendering and using a Vertex Paint -
Once you learned what is a Vertex Paint, you can continue with a tutorial!
- Enabling the Vertex Paint Window -
Today I’ve got a requested potion to make, but I want my “Potion Juice” or whatever you call it, to be in a gradient color. I just don’t want it in a single color like pink or green…
I want it to be in a gradient color that contains pink, purple and red color!
So, let’s firstly enable our Vertex Paint Window.
Select the object and go to the “Object Mode” on the bottom and click “Vertex Paint” like show on the picture below! 
Very nice! You enabled your “Vertex Paint” Window. Now you got a brush, but where do I change to color of the brush or radius, maybe strength?
Picture below is showing you all settings of the brush for painting a mesh.
-Painting-
Now you can select the color on the left side of your screen and start painting! You can also change the radius of the brush ( allows you to change the brush size ), but also you can change the strength of the brush ( allows the brush to colorize on the mesh easy or hardly ). I recommend leaving these settings to default ( Radius & Strength ).
Now go ahead, select the color and start clicking on the vertices of the mesh, you will see something like this.
Once you are done with painting, your “Potion Juice” should look something like this. That’s a gradient with 3 colors ( Pink, Purple, Red ).
-Making a Texture on the UV Map Editor-
Now, before you create a texture, I want you to first enable “Vertex Color Paint” in the material property. So, firstly go to the “Material” Window and click “New” to make a new material.
Now check the box to true in the “Vertex Color Paint”. The reason for enabling this is that, if you leave this box to false, you won’t be able to see your “Texture” in the Render, so we don’t want that for sure.
Okay, so now click and drag the “Triangle” on the top-right corner. It doesn’t really matter where are you going to drag it, left or down, it’s really same.
In this case, I dragged the new window down. So if you drag it down too, your screen should look something like this. If you drag it to the left, your screen will be splitted on the half in a vertical line.
Now we pulled our new window down, but what’s the point of it? We are going to use this new window to open our UI/Image Editor. Let’s continue.
In the bottom of your new window, there is a small “White Cube” in the Left-Bottom Corner, you will click that “White Cube” just like shown on the picture below.
Once you click the “White Cube”, a small window will appear with different “Editors” in Blender. We are going to open UV/Image Editor.
After you open your UV/Image Editor, all these meshes in the background will dissapear and a small “Grid” will appear. We will actually use this “Grid” for unwraping our mesh onto it.
Once we got our UV/Image Editor open, we are going to make a texture now! But we have to unwrap the mesh firstly. Go to the bottom/old window and click “Edit Mode” like show on the picture.
When you are in the “Edit Mode”, click “U” button on your keyboard and click on the “Follow Active Quads” button. After that click “OK” button and this is going to automatically unwrap our mesh on the UI/Image Editor “grid”.
Woah, what happened? What are these squares? Well, actually when you click “Follow Active Quads”, your mesh will unwrap of course, but while unwraping it will re-size a lot. We have to resize this, I can call it a “map” ( unwrapped mesh ), using “S” button on your keyboard and moving your mouse to the middle of the “map”. Before you resize it, you need to select the whole map, by pressing “A” button on your keyboard.
Your map might be to far from the grid, so you will select the whole map again and click “G” on your keyboard to move your map. Where you will move it? The whole map MUST be on the grid like shown on the picture below,
othervise your texture will split.
After we make our map positioned on the grid, we will open a new image. Click the “New” button just like shown on the picture.
Don’t change anything, just click “OK” when a new window appears.
Your grid and map will be resized again, so you will hover your mouse cursor on the new window and zoom out, by rolling your middle wheel button backwards.
- This is how your screen should look now.
-Baking the Texture-
Now we are going to “bake” our texture. No, I am not talking about cooking, I am talking about making our texture visible!
Our first step (1) is to click on the “Render Window” and search in its properties “Bake” (2).
Once you open your “Bake” property in the “Render Window”, you will search a “Full Render” button, click it and click on the “Vertex Colors” button. This will make our texture visible in “Render Mode” and in the UI/Image Editor.
After that you can click on the “Bake” to bake our texture!
Now this might take 1-2 minutes, but everything depends on how many vertices, faces, edges, actually how is your map of the mesh really complex! Our mesh is not that complex, so it takes like 1 minute.
Boom! There we go! Our texture is baked and visible! But why it didn’t show my texture ON the mesh. Well you can see your texture on the mesh, if you…
If you got to the “Object Mode” in the bottom and click the small “White Circle”. Ha! It’s not a “White Cube”, it’s a “White Circle”! Click on it and select “Texture”.
Now we can see our texture on our mesh.
-Render with Vertex Paint Texture-
Now Rendering in Blender will be really easy now. Click the “White Circle” again and select “Rendered”.
There we go! Our potion looks really potionistic now!
That’s all people… wait… actually there is more! I bet you have wondered “Hm, how am I going to import this texture in ROBLOX Studio and am I going to be able to see it?”. Yes! You can!
-Importing the texture in Studio-
While you are still in Blender and you want your mesh to be loaded with a texture in ROBLOX Studio, you can click on the “Small Folder button” and click “Save as Image…”. In that way, you will save your texture on your computer and load it back on the mesh you made in ROBLOX Studio.
I won’t really bother you with placing the texture on the mesh, because you should already know it.
But anyways here are the steps how to do it:
-1. Import your mesh in the ROBLOX Studio
-2. Find the property called “TextureID” in the mesh
-3. Open your texture image.
-4. If you still can’t see your texture, try reuploading it again.
-5. That’s all! Pretty simple.
Here is the result of our potion we made in Blender!
I really hope you guys enjoyed and learned something new in this tutorial. Actually this is my first tutorial and very detailed one. There is no way you missed something! But if you did, don’t be shy, feel free to reply on this tutorial if you got some questions or you could DM me on Developer Forum profile.
Thanks for reading!