This tool is a GPU-based painting tool that allows you to paint vertex colors and texture masks.
The version shipped with the Weatherade system is fine-tuned to work with Weatherade shaders.
This tool utilizes the power of compute shaders, allowing it to paint even on high-poly meshes with decent performance.
Total Brush has two main modes:
In this mode you can paint the colors of the mesh vertices, which are used as a mask to erase or add the coverage on the surfaces.
In this mode, you can paint an additional texture mask, which will be automatically created and set to the selected terrain's material the first time you paint.
First of all, select an object in the scene which you want to paint on.
Total Brush offers two different paint tools:
The brush size in units.
The opacity of the brush.
This range defines the minumum and maximum values, that painted colors may have.
Weatherade uses the value of 0.5 as a default, meaning painting this value will not take any visual difference with the non-painted mesh. This made for the purpose to be able to add and erase the procedural coverage.
Internally, Weatherade shader rounds this value to determinate what to do with the procedural coverage mask - erase or add: if the value is >= 0.5, it will be rounded to 1, which means, that we add to the mask, otherwise - erase.
Next it remaps this value in the following way depending on the previous step to get the full 0-1 range of the painted mask:
And finally it lerps these values using the selected mode (erase/add) to get the final painted mask.
For example: if you painted the mesh vertices with 0.75, Weatherade shader will add 0.5 to the procedural coverage mask, but if you paint with 0.25, the 0.5 will be substracted from the procedural mask.
The RGBA color of the brush.
The Channel Mask allows you to choose which color channels will be affected while painting.
In Built-in RP the Weatherade snow shaders currently only utilizes the ⠀R⠀ channel, while URP version can uses all four channels. But the rain shaders utilizes all four channels in both BiRP and URP.
You can toggle the Solo Mode by enabling the checkbox to the right of the Channel Mask label. This mode allow you to paint only one channel at a time just like in the Unity terrain texture painting tool.
In the Solo Mode the channels are named as 'Overall', 'Layer0', 'Layer1', 'Layer2' which corresponds to ⠀R⠀⠀G⠀⠀B⠀⠀A⠀. You can select only one layer at a time in this mode. If 'Overall' is selected, Total Brush will paint into the ⠀R⠀ just like it did in the regular channels mode. But if any of the layers is selected, Total Brush will paint only that layer while erasing the other 2 layers respectively.
If you are starting to paint on a mesh or terrain for the first time, it is recommended to fill its colors with the default value of 0.5 to override the existing vertex colors (for mesh renderes) or set the default gray color in the texture mask (for terrains).
Use the bucket tool button to fill with the selected color and multiplier.
Press the Start Paint button to enter the painting mode.
When you first time paint any object, Total Brush adds the Paintable Object component, which stores paint data and manages the Additional Vertex Streams, that are used to pass paint data to the MeshRenderer component.