<aside> 💡 NOTE: This page refers to an open source vertex coloring toolkit
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SX Tools is a multi-layer vertex coloring toolbox, referencing a workflow from common 2D image editing programs.
For game artists, material channels are presented as grayscale layers. Regular paint operations like gradients, color fills and even occlusion baking can be performed directly to material channels like they were vertex color layers. The toolbox comes with a custom material that displays all edits in the viewport in realtime.
The artist can therefore apply per-vertex occlusion/metallic/smoothness/transmission/emission directly on the model, and tweak the results interactively.
SX Tools is a lightweight content pipeline for creating vertex-colored game assets, with easy generation of color variants and LOD meshes.
A full PBR (Physically Based Rendering) material can be driven with vertex-based inputs. Material properties are driven by data from UV channels.
This tool ships with baseline shader networks for Unreal and Unity.
Image 1: SX Tools simplifies vertex coloring and automates high-poly mesh generation for games
Download the zip file, unzip it to a folder, then install and enable sxtools.py through the Blender add-on interface
Set the Library Folder location in SX Tools preferences to point to the folder where SX Tools was unzipped. This folder should contain palettes.json, materials.json, gradients.json and categories.json
Image 2: The Library Folder must be set before using SX Tools
SX Tools will appear in the top right corner of the 3D view. Open the Misc-tab in the top right corner of the 3D View, pull the tab in from side of the screen
Installation will automatically disable Blender Preferences → Save & Load → Relative Paths
Create and select a mesh for Scene Setup