Planes you place, and paint you can see

v368962
9 September 2026
38 changes in this update

Added

24 changes
  • Planes you place yourself. A Plane button beside Sketch, so "which plane?" is no longer answered only by Top, Front, Right or a face that already exists.

  • Build one off a global plane, off a face of a part, or off another plane, then push it along its normal with Offset and lean it over with Angle.

  • Drag a plane instead of typing its offset: an arrow stands on it, and everything drawn on the plane follows as it slides.

  • A plane built from a face rides that face -- make the part taller and the plane moves up with it.

  • Planes stack, so three ribs ten apart are each "ten further on" -- change the bottom one and the rest follow.

  • Sketch on one the way you sketch on anything else: press Sketch, click the plane.

  • Planes are drawn in the viewport with their names beside them, and each has an eye in the feature tree.

  • Paint is a texture now, not vertex colour. A stroke goes into a 1024x1024 canvas, so a bare box paints at brush resolution with no Subdivide first.

  • A painted part exports its own material. Compile .vmdl writes the canvas to a PNG, wraps it in a .vmat and binds it to the part.

  • Entering Paint on a part whose UVs will not hold paint inserts a UV Project above it automatically, and says so. It undoes with one Ctrl+Z like any feature.

  • A material brush. Press Material in the Paint workspace and drag on the model to lay a material onto faces instead of picking them one at a time.

  • The brush uses whatever is selected in the Materials browser, so you can brush one on, click another and keep going without leaving the model.

  • It outlines the faces it is about to take, because a material belongs to a whole face: on a coarse box a small ring still paints an entire side.

  • Bones can be placed inside a model, not just on its skin. Middle is the default: a click puts the joint halfway through the material under the cursor.

  • So a spine runs down the middle of a chest instead of down the front of it, which is where a joint has to be for the weights around it to make sense.

  • While placing, the run of material being measured is drawn with its thickness, so you see where the joint will land before you click.

  • A Y=0 toggle forces every placed joint exactly onto the mirror plane, so a chain placed with it on mirrors cleanly.

  • A Falloff dropdown on the sculpt bar: Smooth for a soft mound, Sharp for a hard crease, Linear for an even fade, Constant to move the whole disc at once.

  • Hold Ctrl while sculpting to invert the brush -- Draw carves in, Inflate deflates, Grab drags the opposite way. The ring turns red so you can see it before you click.

  • Sculpting hotkeys: 1-6 arm the six brushes, X mirrors, M masks, and [ and ] shrink and grow the brush.

  • Rebind any Effigy key. Settings has a Hotkeys section listing every key the tool registers -- click one, press the new key, and it takes effect immediately.

  • Rebinds live in the engine's own shortcut store, so a change here also shows up in the editor's Editor Keybinds page, and the other way round.

  • A UV checker view toggle, in Settings under View. Stretching and seams show on the surface instead of waiting for a paint or a bake to smudge them.

  • An unwrap now says what it did -- how many charts, how many faces, and the texel density -- and warns when the result still will not hold a bake.

Improved

1 change
  • The settings window folds up. Every section is a header you click to collapse or expand, and it remembers which ones you had open.

Fixed

12 changes
  • Paint is visible. It never was: the colours went into the mesh's vertex colour stream, which the shader everything renders with does not read, so a painted part looked exactly like an unpainted one.

  • Paint is no longer limited by the mesh. A stroke used to land on the corners of a box and spread across whole faces; it now resolves as finely as the canvas whatever the mesh.

  • A held brush no longer keeps darkening. Re-stamping the same spot over and over stays the same mark.

  • A material you dropped on a face still wins on a painted part -- paint takes the slots that had nothing.

  • A compiled model arrives wearing a material instead of the bright red missing-material shader. Every slot the mesh uses is named now, the rest pointing at materials/default.vmat.

  • A painted part compiles to its paint, the way any texture survives a compile.

  • A compiled static model samples its texture the right way up. The OBJ exporter was writing V unflipped, so a painted or textured static model came out upside down.

  • Materials from the browser bind to something that exists. Dropping a compiled .vmat_c used to write a reference nothing resolves, and the face came back bright red.

  • The same cause made a part wearing oak.vmat take a second slot for oak.vmat_c. It recognises them as one material now.

  • Dragging a multi-bone selection in Marionette no longer moves one bone twice as far as the rest.

  • Switching workspaces now puts away what you were doing. The note pen no longer stays armed into the next thing you draw, and a running soft-bone preview stops.

  • A plane's dialog no longer puts the face pull arrow on the model. The plane's own offset arrow is the handle there.

Known Issues

1 change
  • Animation clips have to be added again every time you open the tool. The list File > Animation Clips... builds is not written to the .effigy, so add the clips in the same sitting you compile in.