Knald vs Mixos Paint

Knald is a standalone GPU-powered application for generating textures from polygon meshes and 2D sources such as photographs and heightmaps. Its Baker creates textures from high-to-low polygon meshes, while Color To Normals turns images or heightmaps into normal maps for processing in the Integrator. Documented outputs include normal, derivative, displacement or height, ambient occlusion, transmission, concavity, and convexity maps. Knald supports texture baking and physically based rendering workflows. Processing uses single- and double-precision floating point and handles 8-, 16-, and 32-bit image data. The company describes it as suitable for physically based pipelines in interactive work, visual arts, and product design. A supported OpenCL-compatible GPU is required. Listed compatibility is limited to 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. The 30-day demo costs nothing (30-day demo). The Freelancer License costs $100 as a one-time purchase; it covers qualifying individuals or businesses with no more than one director, officer, manager, member, or employee, and permits installation on up to two devices owned by the licensee. The Studio License costs $200 as a one-time purchase.

Mixos Paint is a browser-based tool for painting layered PBR materials onto 3D models, with brushes, geometry-driven smart masks, and live viewport updates. Layers support blend modes, opacity, and separate controls for color, height, roughness, and metallic channels. Smart masks can generate effects such as edge wear, curvature, grime, and cavity. The app imports GLB, glTF, FBX, and OBJ models, and lists 2,669 ready-made PBR materials; users can import their own material libraries. Painting is free without a time limit, but exporting finished texture maps requires a paid plan or license. Paid exports include PBR maps up to 4K and presets for Blender, Unreal, Unity, Godot, Cinema 4D, Maya, and Houdini. The free desktop app's Live Link streams changing maps to Blender, Cinema 4D, and Unreal. Pro costs $8.99/mo, Max costs $17.99/mo, and a Pro license costs $99 once. Mixos says editing runs on the user's device, but it has no certifications or uptime guarantee.