PaintLayer Pro — Photoshop-Style Layers for Blender Texture Painting

Non-destructive paint layers with blend modes, masks, opacity, groups, and a live preview compositor. The texture-painting workflow Blender always needed.

New in v1.1.0: painted layers are now automatically wired into the material, so your work shows on the object right away (set the viewport to Material Preview or Rendered). Plus fixes for mixed-resolution layers and masks, correct blend math on darken-style layers, and a more robust flattened export.

Why PaintLayer Pro

Blender's built-in texture painting flattens every stroke onto a single image — no Multiply layer for shadows, no Overlay for tints, no mask to confine a colour to a region. PaintLayer Pro brings the Photoshop / Krita / Substance Painter workflow into Blender natively: stack layers, blend, mask, group, merge.

Features

• Layer stack with full blend mode list (Mix, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft Light, Add, Subtract, …)
• Per-layer opacity, visibility, lock
• Layer masks — paint masks separately, mix freely
• Layer groups — collapse and toggle multiple layers at once
• Direct + stencil paint modes
• Custom snapshot-based undo system (per-image history, independent of Blender's global undo)
• Live Preview — toggle in main panel; viewport texture updates instantly as you change opacity, blend mode, or visibility
• Update-on-edit (not on draw) — UI stays smooth even with deep stacks
• Non-destructive — original layer images stay separate until you explicitly merge

Compatibility

• Blender: 3.2 and later
• OS: Windows / macOS / Linux

What you get

• PaintLayer Pro add-on (Python only, no DLL)
• README with full quick-start guide
• Free updates for v1.x
• Support through marketplace messaging

Install

Preferences, Add-ons, Install, pick the downloaded ZIP, enable. Press N in the 3D Viewport → PaintLayer tab.

License

GPL-3.0. Standard for Blender add-ons.