After binging more YouTube tutorials by people who make things look effortless I picked up a perpetual license for Surface Painter off Steam. Adobe is going to lock it behind a $20+/month subscription after this year so I guess 2021 is the last version I’ll have.

I had to redo the hull on my basic single outrigger canoe. Apparently the entire model gets one square texture. Because my messy vertex work this meant the brush strokes went every which way. Going back to the model and replacing the hull with a simpler one took way less time starting with a SubD cube. You might even think I’m getting better at it.

After noodling around surface painter I ended up with the featured image for this post. It’s not quite at Myst levels but it looks better than the Money For Nothing models already. Progress!

My goal really isn’t photorealism though, so I’m not discouraged. Once I get my tools together into a cohesive workflow things will start to get really fun.