TOOLS DEVELOPMENT / 3D PAINTING & MATERIALS
Aura is a 3D texturing application in active development. Its workspace brings together painting on a model, building materials with nodes, and inspecting the surface in a 3D viewport. It is an independent project focused on the tools and decisions involved in creating a textured asset.
A texture describes more than an object’s colour. Differences in roughness, metallic response, and other surface properties help establish what an object is made of and how it has been used. Aura provides a workspace for authoring those properties and examining them on geometry.
The process starts with a mesh from a modelling application. Painting places marks on the model; a material graph combines texture inputs and adjustments; the viewport displays the resulting surface. These are the main parts of Aura’s texturing workflow.
The project is aimed at artists developing the appearance of props, characters, and environments. Its focus is texture painting and material work, with the toolset and interface continuing to develop.
Chipped steel — surface detail — Viewport detail of the demonstration material: blue coating, exposed steel and scratch relief.
The asset in context — The complete drum in Aura’s viewport, with the scene Outliner visible.
02 / THE ARTIST’S WORKFLOW
Geometry, paint, material channels,
and a view of the surface.
Mesh and UV layout — The drum’s UV shells displayed in UV View.
Load a mesh to use as the surface for texturing. UV coordinates relate that surface to its texture images. Aura also has multi-object scenes and material assignment in its realtime rendering path; broader consistency across rendering paths remains in development.
The painting workspace — Brush controls, viewport and material graph in the same workspace.
Use brush strokes on the 3D surface to author painted detail. Paint nodes hold painted inputs within the graph, where they can be connected to the material. This supports hand-authored marks alongside other texture inputs.
Building a material — The demonstration asset beside the graph that builds its chipped painted-steel material.
Connect texture inputs, procedural nodes, and adjustments in a material graph. Channels such as base colour, roughness, and metallic response describe different properties of the surface. The available procedural tools and channel workflows are being expanded.
Viewing the material — The shaded viewport beside Render Settings.
View the material on the mesh in the realtime viewport. Aura also includes a GPU path-traced rendering path for look-development work. Matching material behaviour between these views is an ongoing development task.
03 / PAINTING TOOLS
The painting workspace includes controls for the shape of a mark, the way a stroke behaves, and the region it affects. Paint, erase, blur, smudge, fill, and colour sampling are available through the tool palette.
Brush settings and presets — Viewport and Brush Settings details, including the available brush controls.
Adjust the tip, spacing, opacity, flow, pressure mappings, and stroke smoothing. Image-based alpha tips, jitter, and mirror settings provide further brush controls. Brush configurations can be saved as presets from Brush Settings; this is separate from the unfinished Brushes page in the Library.
Selection tools — Viewport and Selection tool controls.
Selection modes include objects, faces, edges, vertices, UV shells, and UDIM tiles, with marquee, lasso, ellipse, and colour-based methods. The selection can act as a paint mask, an isolation region, or a highlight. Fill tools target regions such as a mesh, UV shell, face, or tile.
Automasking controls — Viewport detail alongside the Automasking panel and its remapping curves.
Automasking offers backface, edge, depth, and ambient-occlusion controls, with preview and remapping settings. Brush masks also expose curvature, noise, and channel inputs. AO masking depends on a corresponding mesh-map bake. Paint-stroke undo, redo, and cancellation are part of the editing controls.
The node graph describes how texture data contributes to a material. Connections carry results between nodes, so an input can pass through adjustments before reaching a material channel. Paint is part of this graph through Paint nodes.
For example, a painted input can supply local colour variation while another input describes roughness. Adjusting a node or changing its connections changes that part of the material’s construction. The graph makes these relationships visible as the surface is developed.
The procedural palette includes noises, gradients, shapes, a tile generator, and texture-processing nodes. Levels, curves, colour adjustments, blur, warp, transforms, blending, and height-to-normal conversion provide ways to build and modify texture inputs. Graph groups and backdrops help organise connected work.
Simplified material workflow; individual graphs can contain multiple inputs and channels.
Inside the material graph — The actual node network for Chipped Paint Over Steel. Open the image to read the node names.
Material response controls — The graph and Attribute Editor for the selected material node.
Aura’s material palette includes diffuse, specular, metal, glass, subsurface, fuzz, emission, and opacity nodes. Layer and mix operators connect material responses; additional nodes expose thin-film and other specialised effects. Their appearance and support across render paths continue to be refined.
Procedural inputs — The selected procedural node’s parameters and generated preview beside the graph.
Generated patterns and image inputs can be combined with painted data. Parameters and connections determine how the texture is constructed, while node previews and property controls provide ways to inspect and adjust individual steps.
05 / THE LIBRARY
Browse texture inputs.
Save material groups.
Aura’s Library is a dockable shelf for material and texture content. It brings saved materials and a factory texture catalogue into the workspace, alongside the graph and viewport.
The Materials page lists saved material entries. A group from the node graph can be dropped onto the Library to save its graph definition as a material. Entries have names and thumbnails, with rename and delete controls. The material library is stored separately from individual projects.
The Textures page presents the installed factory catalogue as a thumbnail grid. Texture entries can be dragged into the node graph as image inputs, providing a starting point for a material or another texture-processing step.
The Library — Textures — The Library’s Textures shelf, showing the available texture thumbnails.
A saved material group — A graph group saved to the Materials shelf. The current build shows the entry with its default Group name and preview.
Texture shelf and image parameters — The Textures shelf alongside the selected image node’s attributes.
06 / MAPPING & SURFACE DETAIL
The 2D Canvas — The selected texture displayed in Aura’s Canvas tab.
The UV View displays the asset’s UV layout with grid and wireframe controls, pan, zoom, and island selection. The 2D Canvas provides an image view of the current graph display context. These views complement inspection on the 3D surface.
Mapping controls — The Detail UVs mapping node selected in the graph, with its transform controls visible.
Projection nodes include UV, triplanar, planar, cylindrical, spherical, and hex mapping. Projector objects provide placement controls for supported projection workflows. These determine how a texture is mapped onto a surface; the choice depends on the asset and intended result.
Geo Channels — The Geo Channels panel for the selected mesh. This view shows the map and bake controls.
Geo Channels exposes maps including ambient occlusion, curvature, thickness, position, world-space normals, bent normals, sunfade, and UV-shell data. The panel provides channel settings, tile scope, and explicit bake actions. Geo Channel nodes make baked data available within the material graph.
Mesh and displacement settings — The selected mesh’s attributes, including its surface and displacement controls.
Mesh surface controls offer bump-only, displacement, and combined modes. Settings include height, zero level, detail, and a source from material height, painted data, or an imported map. This is a surface-detail workflow rather than a sculpting tool.
07 / LOOK DEVELOPMENT & WORKSPACE
Separate channel views — Base colour, roughness and metallic viewport modes from the same demonstration scene. Uniform areas reflect the channel data in this captured state.
Colour and light response are authored through material channels. Base colour describes surface colour; roughness affects the spread of reflections; metallic response distinguishes metal from non-metal behaviour. Aura’s multi-channel graphs feed these properties into the viewport material.
UVs and mesh maps — UV View beside the Geo Channels panel.
Aura includes virtual-texture streaming, which presents texture data using tiles and levels of detail. Larger UDIM workflows—where an asset’s UVs span several texture tiles—are part of continuing development. Supported project scale is still being evaluated.
Render settings — The viewport beside Aura’s realtime display and path-tracer controls.
The realtime viewport provides shaded and channel-specific display modes. Path-trace controls include sample count, bounce depth, adaptive sampling, and reconstruction selection. Choices include Raw and Aura Denoiser, with optional DLSS Ray Reconstruction dependent on the build, hardware, and scene. Consistency between rendering paths continues to be refined.
Project Manager — Aura’s project browser, showing project names, types and contents.
Aura uses a native .aura project format and includes save, autosave, and recovery mechanisms. Project persistence and export are distinct parts of the workflow; export coverage remains in development.
Lighting and display controls — The Lighting and Render Settings panels in the workspace.
The Lighting panel provides an HDRI environment picker, rotation, intensity, temperature, and background visibility. Exposure and project colour settings include the legacy sRGB mode and an ACES option through OpenColorIO. These are controls for examining a surface under different viewing conditions.
Scene and camera attributes — The scene Outliner beside camera attributes.
The outliner organises meshes, materials, cameras, and projectors, with selection, visibility, naming, assignment, and transform controls. Camera settings include lens and focus parameters. Dockable panels, saved layouts, and configurable shortcuts let the workspace be arranged around the task.
08 / PROJECTS & OUTPUT
Channel Export — Viewport detail alongside the Channel Export panel and its channel controls.
Channel Export lists a material’s channels with export selection, resolution, and depth settings. Output paths include texture sets using PNG or EXR and reference-render export. Export coverage is still being developed and depends on the material, channel, and tile workflow; these options do not establish compatibility with every downstream renderer.
Project commands — Aura’s native File menu: opening, saving, increments, archives and export commands.
Native project controls include save, save as, incremental saves, recent projects, and a startup file. Project archive export provides a packaging option. Autosave and recovery mechanisms are included, while complete save, reopen, and export workflows remain part of ongoing validation.
Aura is being developed for artists who work on the appearance of 3D assets. A prop may need areas of worn paint and exposed metal; a character may need variation in colour and roughness; an environment asset may need several related surface treatments. These are examples of the material-authoring work the project is intended to support.
Its scope is painting, texturing, and look development. Geometry is prepared in a modelling application. Procedural breadth and export coverage are part of Aura’s continuing development, with production suitability depending on the requirements of each asset and pipeline.
The surface and its graph — A second look at the demonstration material’s surface and connected graph.
A material colour variation — The same demonstration asset after changing its coating colour in the material graph.
09 / DEVELOPMENT
Aura’s current toolset spans painting, selection, material graphs, the Library, mapping, baking, rendering, and project output. Ongoing work expands these systems and checks how they behave together on complete asset workflows. Diagnostics expose frame timing and rendering information for development and troubleshooting.
Inside the development build — The current interface with its material graph and Diagnostics panel. Captured 2 November 2026.
Features and limitations vary by development build.
AURA
An independent 3D texturing application
in active development.