About

How To Use This Documentation

This user manual is an integral part of the add-on itself and contains a description of operators and their work, simple lessons that will help you start using the add-on, and automatically generated descriptions of properties.

Everything is documented - that is, you can simply hover over any add-on element (operator or property) while working, press the help key (F1 in Blender’s standard layout), or call the documentation from the context menu:

and get information about this element.

Note

For some properties, you can find more information here, as (as of version 3.6) Blender tooltips are limited to 400 ASCII characters. That is, for the localized version with utf-8 characters, it is even less. This is due to Blender performance, but it’s hard to fit technical information into little more than a Twitter post (R.i.P.), so the full version of the descriptions for them can be found here.

History

Development began in 2019. Vlad wrote that sometimes there is a need to improve certain areas automatically textures generated by photogrammetric programs and currently he uses photoshop for this, but it is not convenient, but a more acceptable option at that time is Substance Painter, it just has a limit for the size of textures, so for him goals simply do not fit. We discussed for a long time how best to solve the dilemma and decided to implement it with help Blender drawing mode. It is open source, has a good community of users and is developing quite quickly.

In November 2019, we released the first release of the addon, then it was still called “Scan Paint” and in fact, it was quite a simple implementation that used object modifiers for object projection, but the basic concepts were preserved. The main disadvantage of this addon was that it was necessary to export images with distortion, which significantly increased the number of temporary files on the disk and created additional inconvenience.

In October 2020, Camera Projection Painter 0.1.5 was released, which was implemented in a radically different way, namely - its main part was written in C++, as a module for Python. This created a significant advantage - was added automatic distortion of the projected object, faster generation of preview images, faster search object and image name matches, but this also created a big problem with the distribution and update of the addon. The problem was that once Blender started using updated versions of the Python ABI, the module was no longer available use. Also, the problem was that Blender is distributed on different platforms - that is, it should be assemble the module for each platform separately.

In any case, version 0.1.6 lasted quite a long time (3 years), although it required using an older version Blender.

On 01.03.2024, the first release was released that used only the standard Blender API. It didn’t change the workflow too much, however brought support for more camera data files, double-precision floating point data storage, camera selection in texture drawing mode by simple selection instead of gizmo.