Check out promising new 3D texture painting app Wafer
Sparseal has released Wafer, a promising new 3D painting app for iPad.
The $20 app, which is geared towards non-photorealistic texturing, is optimized for use on older iPads, and includes features usually found in more expensive apps, like multichannel painting.
The latest mobile graphics tool from the developers of CozyBlanket and Uniform
Wafer is the third iPad app from Sparseal, the company founded by former Blender sculpting tools lead Pablo Dobarro, and Godot Engine developer Joan Fons.
It follows retopology app CozyBlanket, and all-in-one sculpting, retopology and texture painting app Uniform.
A new iPad app for stylized 3D texture painting
Wafer is a more focused tool than Uniform, being geared specifically to 3D texture painting: primarily stylized textures for games, animation, illustration or motion graphics.
Users can paint directly onto a 3D model – it currently imports OBJ and GLB files – or a 2D texture view, displayed alongside it.
Wafer has the standard features you would expect in a 3D painting app, including customizable brushes with support for pen pressure and pen tilt, and support for stencils, decals and stamps.
It also supports a layer-based workflow, including layer masks and layer blending.
By default, the viewport uses a PBR (metallic/roughness) shader set-up, but it can be customized for non-photorealistic projects.
In the initial release it is only possible to export textures – Sparseal says that it may support 3D export formats, depending on demand – but it is possible to customize channel packing.
Includes features usually found only in more expensive texturing software
More unusual features include an influence system, which lets you control the effect of a brush or other tool according to normals, topology, UV islands, or custom maps.
The app also supports multichannel painting – something only recently added to Mari – making it possible to paint multiple textures (for example, albedo, metallic and roughness) simultaneously.
Optimized for use on older iPads
Wafer is written in Rust, and is optimized for performance even on older hardware.
According to Sparseal, brush performance is “barely affected by texture resolution, layer count or stroke speed”, with the main limitation being the memory of your device.
The app supports 16K textures on any compatible iPad, and 24K textures on a 2018 iPad Pro.
Price and system requirements
Uniform is compatible with iPadOS 16.6+. You can install it for free, but exporting or saving files required a one-time in-app purchase of $19.99.
Get new iPad texturing app Wafer from the App Store
Read more about Wafer on Sparseal’s website
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