MatPlus 1.3.0:

    Features:

        New "Vector Mask" effect: bezier shapes drawn on the model or on the UV layout,

            combined with booleans (Union, Subtract, Intersect, Replace) and with per-point

            feather that works as a second curve, Nuke style.

        New "Stitches" effect: draw the seam path and the stitches lay out along it. The

            curve stays editable and Mirror projects it onto the real geometry.

        New Smart Masks (.mpsmask): a whole mask with its generators, filters, levels and

            paint, reusable in any project. Created from layers and from groups.

        New "Flatten Group": bakes every channel of a group into one editable layer. Its

            channels keep their blend mode, factor and clamp, and "Use Flatten" exports

            from the baked layer instead of the group.

        New BeFX Library: Smart Materials, Smart Masks, PBR textures (AmbientCG), mask

            textures and brushes downloadable from the BeFX Cloud without leaving Blender,

            with search, categories, favourites and an "Only Available" filter.

        Projects are now self-contained: created next to the .blend with their textures

            packed inside, so sending the file sends the whole project. "Make Self-Contained"

            copies a legacy project over; it never moves it. "Open Project" is now

            "Relink Project Folder", a repair tool for a moved or imported project.

        New Output Templates: export presets with nineteen factory formats, five packing

            types, derived maps, name variables and subfolders. The template also decides

            which channels a new project is created with.

        New Display module: HDRI gallery, a managed camera with depth of field, ten

            combinable compositor effects and the MatPlus Viewport switch. MatPlus now

            ships with its own HDRIs, so the environments path is optional.

        New "Skew Correction" in Bake Maps: bakes a perpendicular version of each projected

            map and you paint to reveal it where needed. Apply writes it into the normal map

            and keeps the original bake aside.

        New "From Multires" bake mode, with the Multires Normal, Displacement and Vector

            Displacement passes.

        Bake the whole material set in one pass, with two exclusive toggles: "Group" merges

            the low poly objects in place, "Explode" separates them to isolate the rays.

        New "Combine Materials" export option: several materials in one texture set.

        Fifteen user data channels (User1..User15): not wired to the shader, painted and

            exported, for whatever the pipeline needs.

        AO is now a paintable channel, with a "Replace" toggle choosing whether the

            occlusion multiplying the Base Color comes from the baked map or the layers.

        Displacement split off from the Height channel, activated on its own, and a new

            "Use AO in Specular" toggle so occlusion also affects reflections.

        New "Curvature From Normal" mode, derived from the baked normal map, with Sampling

            Radius, tonemapping bounds and a "Hard Edges" control. The Edge map is now an

            internal dependency of the Curvature.

        Edge Wear redesigned: the hard edges come from the Curvature itself instead of the

            baked Edge map, and the panel is half the size.

        Distort rebuilt: two noise texture slots with thumbnails, noise rotation, and socket

            names that say what they do (Strength, Fine Control, Noise Scale, Small Detail).

        Mask auto-cache: a cached mask un-caches itself while you drag a slider and re-bakes

            on release. Cascading auto-update re-bakes whatever depended on a change, in the

            right order, including Link consumers and the affected cached masks.

        New "Auto-cache New Layers": a new layer caches itself as soon as it gets a mask.

            It hangs from Auto-update, so turning that off also switches it off and

            un-caches the layers.

        The projection box is now a virtual gizmo: no Empty in the scene, cubic, oriented to

            the model and with a size lock. Driven with G, S and Alt+G/R/S; Alt+R realigns it.

        New 2D UV mapping gizmo: offset, rotation and tiling by dragging on the 2D canvas.

        Material Library "Replace Mode": clicking a thumbnail swaps the layer material in

            place, keeping its mask, effects, blend mode and position in the stack.

        Copy and paste layers and groups, also between materials, plus duplicate individual

            effects (three-dot menu or Ctrl + D). The clipboard lasts the session and the

            destination material's channels are synced automatically.

        Layer search in the toolbar, filtering across the whole project including closed

            folders, and multi-selection in the material list to bake or export several at once.

        One single "MatPlus Textures" path replaces MatPlus Masks and Brushes And Icons:

            every first-level subfolder is a library, and "Add Custom Texture" puts your

            own images under the Custom category of every gallery, in every project.

        New project dialog: Output Template, scene Color Management, Auto-Unwrap with its

            Smart UV Project options, "Use MatPlus Environment Settings" and the geometry

            recommendations.

        New "Clean": deletes the project textures no layer uses any more, showing the list

            and the space to recover first.

        Progress bars for export, Smart Materials and Smart Masks, library loading, group

            flattening and resolution changes, which no longer freeze the UI. Export also

            leaves a summary: textures written, time taken, failures and skips.

        Decals now run at their original resolution and no longer generate a proxy, so they

            keep their aspect ratio. Existing projects are migrated on open.

        Per-channel work format: each channel picks the pixel format it is baked with

            internally, independently of the export format.

        Independent brush settings per paint layer and per paint effect, and the brush now

            keeps its size relative to the model as you zoom.

        Every gallery and the layer stack now scroll in a fixed-height, resizable box.

        New "Texture Defaults" (default interpolation for new textures, caches included),

            "Hover Preview" (enlarged floating thumbnail over gallery cells) and

            "Sync Set Material with Viewport Selection".

        New "Grid" and "Clean Viewport" toggles, and a Wireframe section in viewport settings.

        New per-material "Recalculate UDIMs" button in the Set Materials list.

        Deleting a Smart Material, Smart Mask, PBR material or texture from its gallery now

            asks for confirmation: it is permanent and skips the recycle bin.

        Quality Settings and Resolution moved to the add-on preferences.

    Fixes:

        Fix The CryEngine preset now asks for a DirectX normal. CryEngine's own manual puts

            the tangent basis at X+ Y- Z+ and tells you to bake with the green channel

            inverted, so its _ddna was coming out with the green the wrong way round. The

            other eighteen presets were checked against each engine's documentation and

            were already right.

        Fix With Combine Materials, a DirectX normal no longer depends on how many

            materials the set has. The green channel was flipped once per material, so an

            even number of them cancelled out and the file came out in OpenGL.

        Fix Baking no longer returns a flat, single-colour map when the MatPlus collection

            is hidden in the Outliner. Its bake objects were invisible to the viewport

            render, so the map came out as the viewport background colour, and only Cycles

            was unaffected. MatPlus now shows them for the bake and hides them again after.

        Fix Adding an object that carries more than one material is now refused, the same

            rule New Project already applied. It was creating one Set Material per material

            slot, and those could never be exported.

        Fix Adding several Set Materials at once, by selecting several objects, no longer

            leaves most of them untextured and magenta. Past the fourth one they were never

            given their default layer.

        Fix Renaming a Set Material you have just created now actually renames it. Until

            something had been written into its folder, the name box took the new name while

            the material kept the old one.

        Fix Exporting with "Create New Material" no longer leaves the new materials without

            textures when two Set Material names start with the same 25 characters. The

            exported files were always correct.

        Fix Deleting a layer, a mask, an effect or a group no longer wipes their texture

            files off disk straight away, so undoing the delete brings them back instead of

            leaving the material magenta. The files are collected later by the "Clean" button.

        Fix Removing a Set Material now keeps its textures in a trash folder inside the

            project, so undoing the removal brings the material back with its textures.

        Fix Un-caching a mask no longer deletes its baked file, so undoing a filter change

            brings the cached mask back instead of leaving it magenta.

        Fix An effect on a channel is no longer mistaken for the one sitting at the same

            position in the mask, which also fixes filter updates made from the Mask tab.

        Fix A new mask or channel effect now lands right above the selected effect instead

            of jumping to the top of the stack. Only Filter and Decal behaved that way.

        Fix Duplicating a Decal no longer breaks the mask chain, which left the copy

            disconnected and raised an error when it was deleted.

        Fix Text Effects can be duplicated now, and the copy gets its own text and its own

            image, so editing one no longer changes the other.

        Fix Editing a Text Effect a second time now shows the new text on the model instead

            of keeping the old one. Deleting one also releases its text curve.

        Fix Compatibility with N-Panel management addons: every sidebar hotkey (Ctrl+D,

            Alt+Up/Down, E on curves, G/R/S on the projection box) stopped working once the

            MatPlus tab was renamed to a custom category. They follow the real tab name now.

        Fix Height and Displacement are now baked around mid grey (0.5), the Substance

            convention: below it carves in, above it stands out. A layer pushing inwards was

            clamped away before and the exported map came out black.

        Fix The Height and Displacement sliders now go from -1 to 1 and mean it: -1 is the

            deepest an 8 or 16 bit map can hold. They used to accept twice that and the extra

            half was clipped on export, so parts of the texture came out flat while the

            viewport still showed relief. An export that still does not fit now says so

            instead of clipping in silence.

        Fix "Normal from Height" came out completely flat with EEVEE as the bake system

            whenever the layer's height was negative. Cycles exports are unaffected.

        Fix Padding in EEVEE is now measured in pixels at any resolution, "No Padding" finally

            means no padding, and "Dilatation Infinite" works there for the first time.

        Fix Mirror and Array modifiers are now disabled during baking, which was producing

            incorrect results.

        Fix Bevel measured the edge in the wrong place on soft masks. New Bevels are born with

            the correct computation and materials already made keep their look.

        Fix The Curvature was not packed with the project, so it was lost when the file was

            opened on another machine.

        Fix The HDRI environment is relinked when the file is opened on another machine,

            instead of the scene coming up unlit.

        Fix Decal placement uses face projection, more accurate when sticking them to the

            surface.

        Fix "Add Filter" is now greyed out on a group in Material mode, like every other

            effect in the menu: it could never do anything there. Left-over filters from

            before can be hidden and deleted without throwing an error.

        Fix Re-enabling auto-update lost the first change, and the end of a gesture was not

            detected on the first drag after assigning an effect.

        Fix Changing the material resolution froze the panel for several seconds with no

            feedback.

        Fix Split/Merge Viewport (2D|3D) with cached masks.

        Fix The Bake System (Blender Cycles / MatPlus EEVEE) is now in the export Global

            Settings, next to the rest of what a bake depends on, and not only in the

            add-on preferences. It is the same setting, so both places stay in step.

        Fix The Suzanne_BeFX and MatBall_BeFX sample scenes have been updated, with their

            textures packed inside.

MatPlus 1.2.3:

    Features:

        Exposed the Tolerance value in mask color pickers.

        Sharpen effect now defaults to "Kernel" mode.

    Fixes:

        Fix Full compatibility with Blender 5.1 and 5.2.

        Fix Crash when using Split/Merge Viewport in Blender 5.2.

        Fix Color picker (eyedropper) could fail near the edges of the viewport in Blender 5.1+.

        Fix Background rendering could hang indefinitely because of thumbnail loading.

        Fix Several issues when importing Smart Materials (thumbnails, focused layer effects, compatibility warnings).

        Fix Normal map strength was not working after a previous change.

        Fix AmbientCG materials without a Metallic map incorrectly used the Roughness Balance/Contrast values.

        Fix Material Library thumbnails could fail to load until reopening the popup.

        Fix UI error when data for an active channel was missing.

        Fix Improved mask handling on the Normal channel.

MatPlus 1.3.0:

    Features:

        New "Vector Mask" effect: bezier shapes drawn on the model or on the UV layout,

            combined with booleans (Union, Subtract, Intersect, Replace) and with per-point

            feather that works as a second curve, Nuke style.

        New "Stitches" effect: draw the seam path and the stitches lay out along it. The

            curve stays editable and Mirror projects it onto the real geometry.

        New Smart Masks (.mpsmask): a whole mask with its generators, filters, levels and

            paint, reusable in any project. Created from layers and from groups.

        New "Flatten Group": bakes every channel of a group into one editable layer. Its

            channels keep their blend mode, factor and clamp, and "Use Flatten" exports

            from the baked layer instead of the group.

        New BeFX Library: Smart Materials, Smart Masks, PBR textures (AmbientCG), mask

            textures and brushes downloadable from the BeFX Cloud without leaving Blender,

            with search, categories, favourites and an "Only Available" filter.

        Projects are now self-contained: created next to the .blend with their textures

            packed inside, so sending the file sends the whole project. "Make Self-Contained"

            copies a legacy project over; it never moves it. "Open Project" is now

            "Relink Project Folder", a repair tool for a moved or imported project.

        New Output Templates: export presets with nineteen factory formats, five packing

            types, derived maps, name variables and subfolders. The template also decides

            which channels a new project is created with.

        New Display module: HDRI gallery, a managed camera with depth of field, ten

            combinable compositor effects and the MatPlus Viewport switch. MatPlus now

            ships with its own HDRIs, so the environments path is optional.

        New "Skew Correction" in Bake Maps: bakes a perpendicular version of each projected

            map and you paint to reveal it where needed. Apply writes it into the normal map

            and keeps the original bake aside.

        New "From Multires" bake mode, with the Multires Normal, Displacement and Vector

            Displacement passes.

        Bake the whole material set in one pass, with two exclusive toggles: "Group" merges

            the low poly objects in place, "Explode" separates them to isolate the rays.

        New "Combine Materials" export option: several materials in one texture set.

        Fifteen user data channels (User1..User15): not wired to the shader, painted and

            exported, for whatever the pipeline needs.

        AO is now a paintable channel, with a "Replace" toggle choosing whether the

            occlusion multiplying the Base Color comes from the baked map or the layers.

        Displacement split off from the Height channel, activated on its own, and a new

            "Use AO in Specular" toggle so occlusion also affects reflections.

        New "Curvature From Normal" mode, derived from the baked normal map, with Sampling

            Radius, tonemapping bounds and a "Hard Edges" control. The Edge map is now an

            internal dependency of the Curvature.

        Edge Wear redesigned: the hard edges come from the Curvature itself instead of the

            baked Edge map, and the panel is half the size.

        Distort rebuilt: two noise texture slots with thumbnails, noise rotation, and socket

            names that say what they do (Strength, Fine Control, Noise Scale, Small Detail).

        Mask auto-cache: a cached mask un-caches itself while you drag a slider and re-bakes

            on release. Cascading auto-update re-bakes whatever depended on a change, in the

            right order, including Link consumers and the affected cached masks.

        New "Auto-cache New Layers": a new layer caches itself as soon as it gets a mask.

            It hangs from Auto-update, so turning that off also switches it off and

            un-caches the layers.

        The projection box is now a virtual gizmo: no Empty in the scene, cubic, oriented to

            the model and with a size lock. Driven with G, S and Alt+G/R/S; Alt+R realigns it.

        New 2D UV mapping gizmo: offset, rotation and tiling by dragging on the 2D canvas.

        Material Library "Replace Mode": clicking a thumbnail swaps the layer material in

            place, keeping its mask, effects, blend mode and position in the stack.

        Copy and paste layers and groups, also between materials, plus duplicate individual

            effects (three-dot menu or Ctrl + D). The clipboard lasts the session and the

            destination material's channels are synced automatically.

        Layer search in the toolbar, filtering across the whole project including closed

            folders, and multi-selection in the material list to bake or export several at once.

        One single "MatPlus Textures" path replaces MatPlus Masks and Brushes And Icons:

            every first-level subfolder is a library, and "Add Custom Texture" puts your

            own images under the Custom category of every gallery, in every project.

        New project dialog: Output Template, scene Color Management, Auto-Unwrap with its

            Smart UV Project options, "Use MatPlus Environment Settings" and the geometry

            recommendations.

        New "Clean": deletes the project textures no layer uses any more, showing the list

            and the space to recover first.

        Progress bars for export, Smart Materials and Smart Masks, library loading, group

            flattening and resolution changes, which no longer freeze the UI. Export also

            leaves a summary: textures written, time taken, failures and skips.

        Decals now run at their original resolution and no longer generate a proxy, so they

            keep their aspect ratio. Existing projects are migrated on open.

        Per-channel work format: each channel picks the pixel format it is baked with

            internally, independently of the export format.

        Independent brush settings per paint layer and per paint effect, and the brush now

            keeps its size relative to the model as you zoom.

        Every gallery and the layer stack now scroll in a fixed-height, resizable box.

        New "Texture Defaults" (default interpolation for new textures, caches included),

            "Hover Preview" (enlarged floating thumbnail over gallery cells) and

            "Sync Set Material with Viewport Selection".

        New "Grid" and "Clean Viewport" toggles, and a Wireframe section in viewport settings.

        New per-material "Recalculate UDIMs" button in the Set Materials list.

        Deleting a Smart Material, Smart Mask, PBR material or texture from its gallery now

            asks for confirmation: it is permanent and skips the recycle bin.

        Quality Settings and Resolution moved to the add-on preferences.

    Fixes:

        Fix The CryEngine preset now asks for a DirectX normal. CryEngine's own manual puts

            the tangent basis at X+ Y- Z+ and tells you to bake with the green channel

            inverted, so its _ddna was coming out with the green the wrong way round. The

            other eighteen presets were checked against each engine's documentation and

            were already right.

        Fix With Combine Materials, a DirectX normal no longer depends on how many

            materials the set has. The green channel was flipped once per material, so an

            even number of them cancelled out and the file came out in OpenGL.

        Fix Baking no longer returns a flat, single-colour map when the MatPlus collection

            is hidden in the Outliner. Its bake objects were invisible to the viewport

            render, so the map came out as the viewport background colour, and only Cycles

            was unaffected. MatPlus now shows them for the bake and hides them again after.

        Fix Adding an object that carries more than one material is now refused, the same

            rule New Project already applied. It was creating one Set Material per material

            slot, and those could never be exported.

        Fix Adding several Set Materials at once, by selecting several objects, no longer

            leaves most of them untextured and magenta. Past the fourth one they were never

            given their default layer.

        Fix Renaming a Set Material you have just created now actually renames it. Until

            something had been written into its folder, the name box took the new name while

            the material kept the old one.

        Fix Exporting with "Create New Material" no longer leaves the new materials without

            textures when two Set Material names start with the same 25 characters. The

            exported files were always correct.

        Fix Deleting a layer, a mask, an effect or a group no longer wipes their texture

            files off disk straight away, so undoing the delete brings them back instead of

            leaving the material magenta. The files are collected later by the "Clean" button.

        Fix Removing a Set Material now keeps its textures in a trash folder inside the

            project, so undoing the removal brings the material back with its textures.

        Fix Un-caching a mask no longer deletes its baked file, so undoing a filter change

            brings the cached mask back instead of leaving it magenta.

        Fix An effect on a channel is no longer mistaken for the one sitting at the same

            position in the mask, which also fixes filter updates made from the Mask tab.

        Fix A new mask or channel effect now lands right above the selected effect instead

            of jumping to the top of the stack. Only Filter and Decal behaved that way.

        Fix Duplicating a Decal no longer breaks the mask chain, which left the copy

            disconnected and raised an error when it was deleted.

        Fix Text Effects can be duplicated now, and the copy gets its own text and its own

            image, so editing one no longer changes the other.

        Fix Editing a Text Effect a second time now shows the new text on the model instead

            of keeping the old one. Deleting one also releases its text curve.

        Fix Compatibility with N-Panel management addons: every sidebar hotkey (Ctrl+D,

            Alt+Up/Down, E on curves, G/R/S on the projection box) stopped working once the

            MatPlus tab was renamed to a custom category. They follow the real tab name now.

        Fix Height and Displacement are now baked around mid grey (0.5), the Substance

            convention: below it carves in, above it stands out. A layer pushing inwards was

            clamped away before and the exported map came out black.

        Fix The Height and Displacement sliders now go from -1 to 1 and mean it: -1 is the

            deepest an 8 or 16 bit map can hold. They used to accept twice that and the extra

            half was clipped on export, so parts of the texture came out flat while the

            viewport still showed relief. An export that still does not fit now says so

            instead of clipping in silence.

        Fix "Normal from Height" came out completely flat with EEVEE as the bake system

            whenever the layer's height was negative. Cycles exports are unaffected.

        Fix Padding in EEVEE is now measured in pixels at any resolution, "No Padding" finally

            means no padding, and "Dilatation Infinite" works there for the first time.

        Fix Mirror and Array modifiers are now disabled during baking, which was producing

            incorrect results.

        Fix Bevel measured the edge in the wrong place on soft masks. New Bevels are born with

            the correct computation and materials already made keep their look.

        Fix The Curvature was not packed with the project, so it was lost when the file was

            opened on another machine.

        Fix The HDRI environment is relinked when the file is opened on another machine,

            instead of the scene coming up unlit.

        Fix Decal placement uses face projection, more accurate when sticking them to the

            surface.

        Fix "Add Filter" is now greyed out on a group in Material mode, like every other

            effect in the menu: it could never do anything there. Left-over filters from

            before can be hidden and deleted without throwing an error.

        Fix Re-enabling auto-update lost the first change, and the end of a gesture was not

            detected on the first drag after assigning an effect.

        Fix Changing the material resolution froze the panel for several seconds with no

            feedback.

        Fix Split/Merge Viewport (2D|3D) with cached masks.

        Fix The Bake System (Blender Cycles / MatPlus EEVEE) is now in the export Global

            Settings, next to the rest of what a bake depends on, and not only in the

            add-on preferences. It is the same setting, so both places stay in step.

        Fix The Suzanne_BeFX and MatBall_BeFX sample scenes have been updated, with their

            textures packed inside.

MatPlus 1.2.3:

    Features:

        Exposed the Tolerance value in mask color pickers.

        Sharpen effect now defaults to "Kernel" mode.

    Fixes:

        Fix Full compatibility with Blender 5.1 and 5.2.

        Fix Crash when using Split/Merge Viewport in Blender 5.2.

        Fix Color picker (eyedropper) could fail near the edges of the viewport in Blender 5.1+.

        Fix Background rendering could hang indefinitely because of thumbnail loading.

        Fix Several issues when importing Smart Materials (thumbnails, focused layer effects, compatibility warnings).

        Fix Normal map strength was not working after a previous change.

        Fix AmbientCG materials without a Metallic map incorrectly used the Roughness Balance/Contrast values.

        Fix Material Library thumbnails could fail to load until reopening the popup.

        Fix UI error when data for an active channel was missing.

        Fix Improved mask handling on the Normal channel.

MatPlus 1.3.0:

    Features:

        New "Vector Mask" effect: bezier shapes drawn on the model or on the UV layout,

            combined with booleans (Union, Subtract, Intersect, Replace) and with per-point

            feather that works as a second curve, Nuke style.

        New "Stitches" effect: draw the seam path and the stitches lay out along it. The

            curve stays editable and Mirror projects it onto the real geometry.

        New Smart Masks (.mpsmask): a whole mask with its generators, filters, levels and

            paint, reusable in any project. Created from layers and from groups.

        New "Flatten Group": bakes every channel of a group into one editable layer. Its

            channels keep their blend mode, factor and clamp, and "Use Flatten" exports

            from the baked layer instead of the group.

        New BeFX Library: Smart Materials, Smart Masks, PBR textures (AmbientCG), mask

            textures and brushes downloadable from the BeFX Cloud without leaving Blender,

            with search, categories, favourites and an "Only Available" filter.

        Projects are now self-contained: created next to the .blend with their textures

            packed inside, so sending the file sends the whole project. "Make Self-Contained"

            copies a legacy project over; it never moves it. "Open Project" is now

            "Relink Project Folder", a repair tool for a moved or imported project.

        New Output Templates: export presets with nineteen factory formats, five packing

            types, derived maps, name variables and subfolders. The template also decides

            which channels a new project is created with.

        New Display module: HDRI gallery, a managed camera with depth of field, ten

            combinable compositor effects and the MatPlus Viewport switch. MatPlus now

            ships with its own HDRIs, so the environments path is optional.

        New "Skew Correction" in Bake Maps: bakes a perpendicular version of each projected

            map and you paint to reveal it where needed. Apply writes it into the normal map

            and keeps the original bake aside.

        New "From Multires" bake mode, with the Multires Normal, Displacement and Vector

            Displacement passes.

        Bake the whole material set in one pass, with two exclusive toggles: "Group" merges

            the low poly objects in place, "Explode" separates them to isolate the rays.

        New "Combine Materials" export option: several materials in one texture set.

        Fifteen user data channels (User1..User15): not wired to the shader, painted and

            exported, for whatever the pipeline needs.

        AO is now a paintable channel, with a "Replace" toggle choosing whether the

            occlusion multiplying the Base Color comes from the baked map or the layers.

        Displacement split off from the Height channel, activated on its own, and a new

            "Use AO in Specular" toggle so occlusion also affects reflections.

        New "Curvature From Normal" mode, derived from the baked normal map, with Sampling

            Radius, tonemapping bounds and a "Hard Edges" control. The Edge map is now an

            internal dependency of the Curvature.

        Edge Wear redesigned: the hard edges come from the Curvature itself instead of the

            baked Edge map, and the panel is half the size.

        Distort rebuilt: two noise texture slots with thumbnails, noise rotation, and socket

            names that say what they do (Strength, Fine Control, Noise Scale, Small Detail).

        Mask auto-cache: a cached mask un-caches itself while you drag a slider and re-bakes

            on release. Cascading auto-update re-bakes whatever depended on a change, in the

            right order, including Link consumers and the affected cached masks.

        New "Auto-cache New Layers": a new layer caches itself as soon as it gets a mask.

            It hangs from Auto-update, so turning that off also switches it off and

            un-caches the layers.

        The projection box is now a virtual gizmo: no Empty in the scene, cubic, oriented to

            the model and with a size lock. Driven with G, S and Alt+G/R/S; Alt+R realigns it.

        New 2D UV mapping gizmo: offset, rotation and tiling by dragging on the 2D canvas.

        Material Library "Replace Mode": clicking a thumbnail swaps the layer material in

            place, keeping its mask, effects, blend mode and position in the stack.

        Copy and paste layers and groups, also between materials, plus duplicate individual

            effects (three-dot menu or Ctrl + D). The clipboard lasts the session and the

            destination material's channels are synced automatically.

        Layer search in the toolbar, filtering across the whole project including closed

            folders, and multi-selection in the material list to bake or export several at once.

        One single "MatPlus Textures" path replaces MatPlus Masks and Brushes And Icons:

            every first-level subfolder is a library, and "Add Custom Texture" puts your

            own images under the Custom category of every gallery, in every project.

        New project dialog: Output Template, scene Color Management, Auto-Unwrap with its

            Smart UV Project options, "Use MatPlus Environment Settings" and the geometry

            recommendations.

        New "Clean": deletes the project textures no layer uses any more, showing the list

            and the space to recover first.

        Progress bars for export, Smart Materials and Smart Masks, library loading, group

            flattening and resolution changes, which no longer freeze the UI. Export also

            leaves a summary: textures written, time taken, failures and skips.

        Decals now run at their original resolution and no longer generate a proxy, so they

            keep their aspect ratio. Existing projects are migrated on open.

        Per-channel work format: each channel picks the pixel format it is baked with

            internally, independently of the export format.

        Independent brush settings per paint layer and per paint effect, and the brush now

            keeps its size relative to the model as you zoom.

        Every gallery and the layer stack now scroll in a fixed-height, resizable box.

        New "Texture Defaults" (default interpolation for new textures, caches included),

            "Hover Preview" (enlarged floating thumbnail over gallery cells) and

            "Sync Set Material with Viewport Selection".

        New "Grid" and "Clean Viewport" toggles, and a Wireframe section in viewport settings.

        New per-material "Recalculate UDIMs" button in the Set Materials list.

        Deleting a Smart Material, Smart Mask, PBR material or texture from its gallery now

            asks for confirmation: it is permanent and skips the recycle bin.

        Quality Settings and Resolution moved to the add-on preferences.

    Fixes:

        Fix The CryEngine preset now asks for a DirectX normal. CryEngine's own manual puts

            the tangent basis at X+ Y- Z+ and tells you to bake with the green channel

            inverted, so its _ddna was coming out with the green the wrong way round. The

            other eighteen presets were checked against each engine's documentation and

            were already right.

        Fix With Combine Materials, a DirectX normal no longer depends on how many

            materials the set has. The green channel was flipped once per material, so an

            even number of them cancelled out and the file came out in OpenGL.

        Fix Baking no longer returns a flat, single-colour map when the MatPlus collection

            is hidden in the Outliner. Its bake objects were invisible to the viewport

            render, so the map came out as the viewport background colour, and only Cycles

            was unaffected. MatPlus now shows them for the bake and hides them again after.

        Fix Adding an object that carries more than one material is now refused, the same

            rule New Project already applied. It was creating one Set Material per material

            slot, and those could never be exported.

        Fix Adding several Set Materials at once, by selecting several objects, no longer

            leaves most of them untextured and magenta. Past the fourth one they were never

            given their default layer.

        Fix Renaming a Set Material you have just created now actually renames it. Until

            something had been written into its folder, the name box took the new name while

            the material kept the old one.

        Fix Exporting with "Create New Material" no longer leaves the new materials without

            textures when two Set Material names start with the same 25 characters. The

            exported files were always correct.

        Fix Deleting a layer, a mask, an effect or a group no longer wipes their texture

            files off disk straight away, so undoing the delete brings them back instead of

            leaving the material magenta. The files are collected later by the "Clean" button.

        Fix Removing a Set Material now keeps its textures in a trash folder inside the

            project, so undoing the removal brings the material back with its textures.

        Fix Un-caching a mask no longer deletes its baked file, so undoing a filter change

            brings the cached mask back instead of leaving it magenta.

        Fix An effect on a channel is no longer mistaken for the one sitting at the same

            position in the mask, which also fixes filter updates made from the Mask tab.

        Fix A new mask or channel effect now lands right above the selected effect instead

            of jumping to the top of the stack. Only Filter and Decal behaved that way.

        Fix Duplicating a Decal no longer breaks the mask chain, which left the copy

            disconnected and raised an error when it was deleted.

        Fix Text Effects can be duplicated now, and the copy gets its own text and its own

            image, so editing one no longer changes the other.

        Fix Editing a Text Effect a second time now shows the new text on the model instead

            of keeping the old one. Deleting one also releases its text curve.

        Fix Compatibility with N-Panel management addons: every sidebar hotkey (Ctrl+D,

            Alt+Up/Down, E on curves, G/R/S on the projection box) stopped working once the

            MatPlus tab was renamed to a custom category. They follow the real tab name now.

        Fix Height and Displacement are now baked around mid grey (0.5), the Substance

            convention: below it carves in, above it stands out. A layer pushing inwards was

            clamped away before and the exported map came out black.

        Fix The Height and Displacement sliders now go from -1 to 1 and mean it: -1 is the

            deepest an 8 or 16 bit map can hold. They used to accept twice that and the extra

            half was clipped on export, so parts of the texture came out flat while the

            viewport still showed relief. An export that still does not fit now says so

            instead of clipping in silence.

        Fix "Normal from Height" came out completely flat with EEVEE as the bake system

            whenever the layer's height was negative. Cycles exports are unaffected.

        Fix Padding in EEVEE is now measured in pixels at any resolution, "No Padding" finally

            means no padding, and "Dilatation Infinite" works there for the first time.

        Fix Mirror and Array modifiers are now disabled during baking, which was producing

            incorrect results.

        Fix Bevel measured the edge in the wrong place on soft masks. New Bevels are born with

            the correct computation and materials already made keep their look.

        Fix The Curvature was not packed with the project, so it was lost when the file was

            opened on another machine.

        Fix The HDRI environment is relinked when the file is opened on another machine,

            instead of the scene coming up unlit.

        Fix Decal placement uses face projection, more accurate when sticking them to the

            surface.

        Fix "Add Filter" is now greyed out on a group in Material mode, like every other

            effect in the menu: it could never do anything there. Left-over filters from

            before can be hidden and deleted without throwing an error.

        Fix Re-enabling auto-update lost the first change, and the end of a gesture was not

            detected on the first drag after assigning an effect.

        Fix Changing the material resolution froze the panel for several seconds with no

            feedback.

        Fix Split/Merge Viewport (2D|3D) with cached masks.

        Fix The Bake System (Blender Cycles / MatPlus EEVEE) is now in the export Global

            Settings, next to the rest of what a bake depends on, and not only in the

            add-on preferences. It is the same setting, so both places stay in step.

        Fix The Suzanne_BeFX and MatBall_BeFX sample scenes have been updated, with their

            textures packed inside.

MatPlus 1.2.3:

    Features:

        Exposed the Tolerance value in mask color pickers.

        Sharpen effect now defaults to "Kernel" mode.

    Fixes:

        Fix Full compatibility with Blender 5.1 and 5.2.

        Fix Crash when using Split/Merge Viewport in Blender 5.2.

        Fix Color picker (eyedropper) could fail near the edges of the viewport in Blender 5.1+.

        Fix Background rendering could hang indefinitely because of thumbnail loading.

        Fix Several issues when importing Smart Materials (thumbnails, focused layer effects, compatibility warnings).

        Fix Normal map strength was not working after a previous change.

        Fix AmbientCG materials without a Metallic map incorrectly used the Roughness Balance/Contrast values.

        Fix Material Library thumbnails could fail to load until reopening the popup.

        Fix UI error when data for an active channel was missing.

        Fix Improved mask handling on the Normal channel.