For those working with Unreal Engine, you might want to check out Surface Forge, a tool created by Arghanion's Puzzlebox designed to paint directly on any mesh, organic or man-made, and achieve production-ready detail in less time. Useful for walls, roads, rock formations or wide landscapes, it adapts to different types of geometry and allows precise editing.
Key Features
The core of Surface Forge is its flexible painting system. Up to three texture layers can be combined using vertex colors or mesh painting, with height-based blending to produce smooth transitions. A built-in decal spawner makes it easy to add fine surface details, while features such as a single-click snow layer, water puddles, RGB paint layers and an alpha layer for masking or removing geometry expand creative control.
Its shader system is built from the ground up to support Nanite displacement, allowing extremely high levels of surface detail. Options like triplanar mapping, cell bombing and quick texture swapping through material instances, plus Megascans support, help integrate Surface Forge into a wide range of workflows.
Here are some of the screenshots given by the developer:
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Requirements and Recommended Setup
To get the best results, make sure these settings and tools are ready in your Unreal project:
- Mesh Paint Plugin: must be enabled for mesh painting to function.
- Virtual Texture Support: required for mesh painting, enable it in the project settings.
- Modeling Tools: recommended for refining meshes, such as beveling edges, when using Nanite displacement.
- Nanite: optional, but many advanced features depend on height information. Note that Nanite displacement is not compatible with Path Tracing.
Try Before You Buy
You can test Surface Forge yourself with a free demo build. It offers a hands-on way to explore the tool’s features and evaluate how it fits into your Unreal Engine workflow.
Some Alternatives
For broader terrain work, Unreal Engine’s built-in Landscape Paint Mode supports multi-layer material painting but is less suited to detailed mesh work or height-based blending. Another option is Texture Paint Champ by Metal Donut, a free tool for painting directly onto static meshes to add dirt, wear, or decals without external apps. Both are useful for texture painting, but neither offers Surface Forge’s full Nanite displacement and blending features.
✨ You can get Surface Forge and see more details on Fab and Gumroad.
👉 Coming soon: Unreal Engine Blueprints for Beginners, a practical guide to building gameplay visually with Blueprints, covering UI, animations, game logic and mini-game projects.
✨ You can get Surface Forge and see more details on Fab and Gumroad.
👉 Coming soon: Unreal Engine Blueprints for Beginners, a practical guide to building gameplay visually with Blueprints, covering UI, animations, game logic and mini-game projects.
Check out our upcoming book!
We invite you to explore "Unreal Engine Blueprints for Beginners", a comphensive book on the concepts and fundamentals seen in this post.
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