LigidPainter vs Surface Labs

LigidPainter is free 3D texturing software for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It generates seamless materials and textures for selected material channels or processes all channels automatically. Artists can paint directly on models or in a 2D scene with custom brushes, normal-map and filter painting, vectoral painting, and XYZ mirroring. Its material workflow includes albedo, roughness, metallic, normal, height, and ambient-occlusion textures, with procedural materials, PBR workflows, and node-based authoring. Projects are stored as folders, allowing saved textures to be retrieved there or exported. The itch.io listing identifies version 3.0.0 and describes the application as in development; its download page offers a 194 MB Windows 64-bit MSI. The maker’s build guide describes Windows and Unix-like builds and lists OpenAL, Freetype, and zlib as required binaries. The license permits unchanged binary redistribution with attribution but prohibits selling it and restricts source-code use.

Surface Labs is a node-based application for building procedural textures and materials by connecting operations in a graph. Its node library includes generators, filters, blends, transforms, normals, channel operations, and math nodes. A GLSL editor supports custom nodes that compile to the native Rust engine; the maker says most nodes render in under 2 ms. Desktop authoring supports up to 8192 × 8192 in 32-bit float, while iPadOS and Android are capped at 4096 × 4096. A headless command-line tool can evaluate graphs and export textures for batch work and CI. The built-in MCP server lets compatible assistants inspect and edit projects, render nodes, and export textures. It is opt-in, binds to loopback, requires a generated token, and rejects non-local Origins, but file arguments can access files available to the user account rather than staying within a project directory. A portable project file bundles materials, subgraphs, images, fonts, a preview model, and export settings. Surface Labs is free while in early access; its iPad build is distributed through TestFlight, where builds expire on the usual 90-day cycle.