ArmorPaint 1.0 landed on September 4, 2026, eight years after the project first appeared as an early-access 3D texture painter with an obvious ambition: be the thing you use when you don’t want to rent Substance 3D Painter. The version number is the smaller half of the story. The larger half is that the project got there by demolishing its own foundations.
The rewrite
ArmorPaint started in Haxe, leaning on the V8 JavaScript engine, sharing lineage with the Armory3D game engine. Version 1.0 is written in C, with no external libraries, and a substantial code-size reduction. Almost everything underneath is now custom: its own 3D engine, its own 2D drawing system, its own UI layer. ArmorLab, previously a separate application, was folded in, and the whole thing was reorganized into a single monolithic repository.
Rewrites of this scale are usually a warning sign. Here the payoff is legible in what the app can now do: paint interactively on much larger assets, with more layers at higher resolutions, because the memory and draw-call overhead of the old stack is gone. GPU backends are Direct3D 12, Vulkan, Metal, and WebGPU, compiled through the Kongruent shader compiler, with ray tracing available on D3D12, Vulkan, and Metal.
What’s new above the waterline
Beyond texturing, 1.0 adds basic sculpting and UV map editing — meaning fewer round trips out to Blender mid-session. There’s timeline support with skinning and tween animation, so you can paint a character and scrub it through motion to check how the texture reads in a pose rather than in a T-stance. New layer types include path/curve layers, text layers, and decal layers. A cloud library ships 2,500+ assets.
The generative features are bundled as Neural Nodes — text-to-image, image-to-PBR (photo-to-material), and upscaling — and, notably, the developer states they run locally on the device rather than through a service. For a texturing tool, image-to-PBR is the genuinely useful one: hand it a photograph of a surface, get back the channel set.
The asterisk on “free”
ArmorPaint’s licensing is dual, and it’s worth being precise since the shorthand “free and open source” undersells one half and oversells the other. The source code is free under the zlib license. The compiled binaries are paid: $19 on itch.io, $17.99 for iOS, $19.99 for Android. Desktop builds cover Windows 10+, Linux, and macOS; the iPadOS and Android editions are marked experimental.
That’s the Blender-adjacent model people keep predicting for texturing tools, minus the foundation — build it yourself for nothing, or pay once, forever, for someone else to have built it. Against a subscription, $19 is not a hard argument to make.