The Mixos manual
Everything in the studio, chapter by chapter — from importing a model to painting, masking, materials, decals, the AI tools and export. All in a browser tab.
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Overview
Mixos is a 3D texturing studio that runs in a browser tab. You import a model, light it, paint and layer physically based materials in real time, and export clean map sets for Cinema 4D, Blender, Unity, Unreal, Arnold, V-Ray and more — no install, no drivers, no upload wait.
This manual covers the whole studio, chapter by chapter: the interface and viewport, then your model, layers, materials, painting, masks, decals and the AI tools, and finally exporting and sharing. Each section opens with the idea in plain language, shows you the actual panel you'll use, and calls out the smaller controls worth knowing. Read it top to bottom the first time; afterwards each section stands on its own.

Free to author
Importing, baking, materials, painting, masking and decals are all free and need no account. You only sign in to save a project to the cloud, use the AI tools, or export at full resolution.
Prefer to learn by doing?
The editor has a built-in interactive tour that spotlights each panel and walks you through your first material. It offers itself on your first visit, and you can rerun it any time: press ? in the editor and choose the guided tour.
The Mixos suite
This manual covers Paint, the texturing editor. Mixos also includes companion apps that share your account and library — Blend, a material mixer for stacking and height-blending PBR materials into a seamless tile, and Auto, a one-prompt AI auto-texturing tool — reachable from the app launcher.
Requirements & the desktop app
Mixos renders on WebGPU, the modern graphics API built into up-to-date browsers. Any current Chromium browser — Chrome, Edge, Arc, Brave — on Windows, macOS or Linux works, as does recent Safari. There is nothing to install or keep updated by hand, and if your browser can't provide WebGPU the editor says so up front rather than failing quietly.
The same studio also ships as a native desktop app for macOS 12+ and Windows 10+, free from mixos.io/download. It is the identical live editor — same projects, credits and account — wrapped in a shell that lifts the browser's limits: bakes fan out across every CPU core, height-map inference runs on native ML hardware (the Neural Engine on Apple Silicon, DirectML on Windows), it works fully offline with an optional offline copy of the asset library, and it adds the Live Link that streams your material into Blender, Cinema 4D or Unreal as you paint (see Finish & share). The app updates itself in the background, so it is never a version behind the web.
Browser or app — your choice
Everything in this manual behaves identically in both. Reach for the app when you bake heavy models often or need to work without a connection; otherwise the browser tab is the whole product.
The workspace
The editor is a single screen. There are no separate windows or modes to switch between — everything you need is one click away, arranged around a live 3D viewport in the centre.

Top-left is the Layer stack, where every material, paint and adjustment pass lives. Below it, the dock switches between your Mesh (objects and the setup checklist) and the Library of materials, brushes and masks. The Properties panel on the right edits whatever is selected. Across the top runs the menu bar, and along the bottom, the status bar.
The status bar along the bottom reports the running state — your preview and export resolutions, the layer count, whether textures are procedural or AI, and a badge for the graphics backend in use.
The viewport
The viewport is a live, physically based render. Orbit with a left-drag and zoom with the scroll wheel. By default the orbit pivot is locked to the model's centre, so press F to recentre on it at any time. Click the Pivot button to unlock the pivot: you can then pan with a right-drag (or middle-drag), the scroll wheel zooms toward your cursor, orbiting turns around whatever point you are inspecting, and a Frame button appears to snap back to the model.
Three display modes share the same scene. 3D is the lit model; 2D flattens the texture into its UV space so you can paint on it directly; Split shows both at once and keeps them in sync.

The lit, navigable model.
The channel strip beneath the viewport switches what you are looking at: the full PBR shade, or a single channel — Base Color, Normal, Height, Roughness or Metallic — on its own (keys 1–5; 0 returns to the full view). Any opt-in channels a layer has switched on (Emissive, Opacity, Transmission) join the strip too. It is a preview only and never paints; use it to inspect exactly what a map contains.
Full PBR
The lit result of every channel combined — what the surface actually looks like.
Navigating the 2D view
In 2D and Split modes the flat view has its own navigation: middle-drag to pan around the texture and scroll to zoom, so you can work into a detail without losing your place on the 3D side.
For a final-render look, click Ray in the view controls. The viewport switches to a progressive path-traced render of the current view — real bounced light, soft shadows and glossy reflections on the exact layer stack you are editing. It resolves from noisy to clean as samples accumulate, and any camera move restarts it. Because it reads the same material you're editing and changes nothing about your project, use it to judge roughness, metallic and height under true lighting, then toggle back to keep painting.
More on Ray
The full path-tracing workflow — depth of field with a physical thin-lens camera, all six tone-mapping curves, and saving a framed render as an image — is covered in the Path-traced preview guide.
Lighting & environment
An HDRI environment lights the scene. Click the HDRI button (the globe icon) in the view controls to open the environment and display settings, then choose a preset to judge a material under the lighting it will ship in. Mixos ships around fifty HDRIs grouped into Studio & Indoor, Outdoor & Nature, Sunrise & Sunset, Night and Urban — with eight featured up front (Studio, Warehouse, Neutral, Outdoor, Golden Gate Hills, Sunset, Moonless Golf and Shanghai Bund) — or upload your own .hdr or .exr.
Environment
Display
Preview a material under the lighting it will ship in. The environment is preview-only — it never changes the exported maps.
Exposure and environment intensity set how bright the lighting reads, Env Rotation spins the lighting and reflections around the model without swapping the HDRI, and you can show the HDRI as the background or keep a clean studio backdrop. The display sliders — brightness, contrast and saturation — tune the viewport only.
Lighting is preview-only
The environment and display settings change how the model looks on screen, not your textures. Base color stays unlit, so your exported maps are identical whatever lighting you preview under.
Your model
Import & primitives
Mixos opens with a lit sphere and a default material, so you can start painting immediately. The Shape control in the view controls swaps the sphere for a cube, plane or cylinder when you just need a surface to test a material on. With the default material selected, its Properties include a Viewport Surface switch — a flat shaded colour or a UV checker, handy for judging a material's tiling and scale.

Start on a primitive to test a material, or import your own mesh. (Shown with a UV checker.)
To texture your own asset, open the Mesh tab and drag in a model, or click to browse. Mixos accepts GLB, GLTF, FBX and OBJ files up to 150 MB. If the file carries its own PBR textures, they come in too, as ordinary editable layers — a single base material when the object has one material, a masked layer per material slot when it has several, and a stack per part for a multi-part model — so you refine an existing look rather than start from zero.
Once a model is imported, the Mesh tab shows a guided Texture Setup checklist that walks you through preparing it: unwrap its UVs, bake its shape maps, then texture. Each step unlocks the next, and the following sections take them in order.
No model handy?
The Library's Models tab holds a catalog of free CC0 3D models — furniture, props, tools, electronics and more. Click one to load it and practice on real geometry.
Very large models
Import a model over about 250,000 triangles and Mixos offers to optimize it — reducing the triangle count and regenerating the UV layout — so unwrapping, baking and painting stay fast. It's optional; you can keep the full resolution and carry on.
Unwrap UVs
A texture needs a UV layout — a flat, non-overlapping map of the surface to paint onto. Mixos reuses the UVs already on your model when they are clean, and generates a fresh layout in one click when they are not. You don't unwrap by hand.

Unwrapping lays the surface flat into non-overlapping islands — the map you paint onto. Mixos does it in one click.
For a multi-part model, a Texture layout choice appears: Combined packs every part into one shared atlas — a single texture set for the whole model — while Per-object gives each part its own 0–1 layout, baked and exported separately.
Re-unwrapping resets the layout
The first unwrap of a model with no usable UVs is safe. Re-unwrapping a model that already has a layout is more disruptive: it rebuilds the UV islands and clears the baked maps along with any paint or masks tied to the old layout, and it can't be undone — so Mixos asks first.
Bake mesh maps
Baking reads the model's geometry into a set of maps — curvature, ambient occlusion, thickness and edge wear among them. These describe where edges, cavities and thin areas are, and they are what let smart materials and geometry masks place wear on edges and grime in crevices automatically.
Set the bake Resolution — 512 up to 4096, 2048 by default — to match your texture target, and pick a Quality preset: Preview for a fast look, Balanced for everyday work, or Final for the cleanest result before export. An Advanced panel fine-tunes how pronounced the wear and cavity detail are: AO Distance sets how far ambient occlusion reaches into recesses, Edge Width and Edge Scale control the spread and intensity of edge wear, and Curvature sets how sharply edges and creases read.
Baking turns the model's shape into maps — curvature, occlusion, normals and position — that smart materials and masks read to place wear and dirt.
Bake before you texture
Smart materials and every geometry-driven mask rely on the curvature and ambient-occlusion maps. If you skip the bake, those effects have nothing to anchor to and the surface looks flat — so the mask tools that need them stay locked until you bake.
Multi-part models
A model built from several parts keeps those parts separate. The Mesh panel's Parts tab lists every object; click one to make it active — the viewport outlines it and the Layer stack switches to that part's own layers, so each part is textured independently. A badge beside each name counts the layers it carries, and painting always lands on the active part.
Each row has an eye to hide the part, a solo button to isolate it while you work, a flip-normals toggle for parts that import inside-out (it reverses that part's surface normals so it shades and paints the right way round), and a frame button to zoom the viewport to it; Show All brings everything back, and the selection outline can be toggled from the panel header. If you'd rather treat the whole model as one surface, Combine fuses the parts into a single mesh with one unified unwrap — but it's destructive: it resets every part's layers to a fresh material and clears the baked maps, and it can't be undone, so Mixos asks first.
Strokes going missing?
In per-object mode a stroke only affects the active part. If paint seems not to land, check the Mesh panel — you are probably painting a part other than the one you selected there.
Layers
Layer types
Texturing in Mixos is non-destructive: everything stacks as layers, top to bottom, and each one blends over the ones beneath. The add menu (the + at the top of the Layer stack, or the bar at its foot) offers every layer type.
Add Layer
A Material (fill) layer is a whole PBR material. A Paint layer is hand-painted strokes. Clone stamps pixels sampled from one part of the surface onto another. A Blank layer is an empty canvas to build up. Image to Material turns a photo into a material. A Decal stamps an image onto the surface. An Adjustment layer retunes everything below it. And a Group folds related layers together so you can move, blend and mask them as one.
Double-click a layer's name to rename it, and the ⋯ menu on each row holds Duplicate, Delete and, for groups, Ungroup, Flatten and Save as Smart Material — which snapshots the whole group into a reusable material in your library.
Blending, opacity & order
Every layer carries a blend mode and an opacity. Drag to reorder — higher layers cover lower ones — hide a layer with its eye while you work, and fold passes that belong together into a group with its own blend and opacity.
The blend mode sets how a layer combines with everything beneath it. Mixos offers the full set — twenty-six modes grouped as Normal, Darken, Lighten, Contrast, Comparative and Component — the same families you'd find in a 2D image editor. In practice a handful do most of the work: Multiply for dirt and shadow, Screen for dust and worn highlights, Overlay for punchy contrast.
Normal
Darken
Lighten
Contrast
Comparative
Component
Darkens — great for dirt, grime and shadow passes.
Because nothing is flattened until export, you can return to any layer at any time and retune it without redoing the work above it.
Height Blend
When you stack two materials, switch on Height Blend on the upper one for a far more convincing seam. Instead of a flat crossfade, the layers interlock by their height maps — the taller material shows and the lower one fills its low spots, so gravel beds down into sand and worn paint breaks along a surface's relief. The Contrast slider sets how sharp that seam is; opacity stays a separate, overall fade, so the two controls never fight.
The two materials interlock by height — the taller one breaks through instead of fading.
Height Blend needs height below
It compares this layer's height against the material directly beneath it, so it becomes available once you have two stacked materials that carry height maps. The card lives in both the Layers panel and the layer's Properties, and lights up to prompt you when it can engage.
Adjustment layers & filters
An adjustment layer corrects everything beneath it without touching those layers directly. It carries a stack of filters — fourteen in all — each present and neutral until you change it: Exposure, Brightness / Contrast, Levels, Curves, Color Balance, Hue / Saturation, Vibrance, Gradient Map, Invert, Posterize, Threshold, Blur, Sharpen and Warp. Enable the ones you want with the eye on each; the rest stay out of the way.
An adjustment layer retunes the material beneath it — here, the object's diffuse colour — non-destructively.
Filters can target specific channels — base color, roughness, metallic or height — so you can lift only the roughness or shift only the base-color hue; colour-only filters like Hue / Saturation and Gradient Map affect base color alone. Add a mask to the adjustment to confine the correction to part of the model.
Adjustments preview live
Adjustment-layer filters show in the 3D viewport but aren't baked into exported maps yet — the export dialog flags this before you export. Apply the same correction in your engine if you need it in the final files.
Materials
The material library
Open the Library — the dock below the Layer stack switches between Mesh and Library, and the add-layer menu's Material entry lands there too — for a deep catalog of ready-made PBR materials: brick, concrete, stone, marble, tile, wood, metal, fabric, leather and more. Hover to preview, click to apply. Applied materials join your layer stack, where you can re-tint, rescale, reorder and blend them.
The three tabs at the top set what you're doing: Assets browses the catalog, Import brings in your own maps, and Generate makes new assets with AI. Within Assets, the source row switches between the built-in materials, CC0 Models, Smart materials, Masks, Decals, Brushes and HDRIs, plus Saved for your uploads and team-shared materials, Community for AI materials shared by other users, and Generated for everything you've made.
Adjust a material
Every material layer can be retuned from its Properties without touching the source maps. In the Look section, per-channel sliders offset the Roughness and Metallic and scale the Normal strength, while the colour controls — brightness, contrast, saturation and a hue shift — re-tint the base colour. A library material turns glossier, more matte, flatter or warmer in seconds.
Rusted Iron
Material / 2048×2048
Color
Tip
Reach for these before adding an adjustment layer: they live on the layer itself, travel with it when you reorder, and — unlike adjustment filters — do bake into the exported maps.
Tiling, transform & projection
Every material layer has a Tiling control in its Properties. Raise it to repeat the material more times across the surface, lower it to make the detail larger — it is the quickest way to get the scale of a brick, weave or grain reading right for your model.
For finer control, open the UV Transform popover (in the 2D view's bottom bar, and in the layer's Look section). It flips the layer across U or V, rotates it — with 90° snap buttons — sets independent tiling on U and V, and nudges it with an X / Y offset, so you can line a pattern up exactly where you want it.
By default a material follows the model's UV layout. When the UVs are messy, or you simply want to drape a material over the surface without unwrapping, switch the layer's Projection mode. Planar lays it flat along one axis, Triplanar blends it from all three (ideal for rock, terrain and architecture), and Cubic, Cylinder and Sphere wrap it to those shapes. Triplanar adds a Blend Sharpness control for how tightly the three projections meet, and every projected mode has its own Projection Scale.
Preview only — projection isn't baked into exported maps yet (exports use the UV layout).
Projection is preview-only for now
Projection modes change how a material looks in the 3D viewport, but exported maps are still written from the UV layout — so a triplanar or planar layer will look different in the exported ZIP than on screen. Tiling scale and the UV transform, which work in UV space, do bake into the export.
Smart materials
Smart materials are layered presets that read your baked maps, so edge wear lands on edges and grime gathers in crevices automatically — rusted iron, weathered steel, mossy stone, aged wood and dozens more, all under the Library's Smart tab. Applying one adds a group to your stack that you can open up and retune like any other layer.
A smart material is a stack — a base, wear on the edges and dirt in the cavities — each reading the baked maps. Toggle the layers.
Bake first
Smart materials only place wear correctly once the model is baked. With no bake, their masks are empty and you get the flat base material.
Color ID
A Color ID map splits the model into flat, distinct colour regions so you can mask by part — all the metal trim, all the rubber, all the glass — in one click. Generate an ID map from the model's own material slots or object groups (or upload your own), assign a material to each region, and Mixos builds a masked layer for each one. The Color ID controls live in the Mesh tab's Texture step, beside AI Auto-Texture.
Each flat ID colour is a region. Reassign a part's material in one click — no hand-masking required.
Note
Color ID and AI Auto-Texture are separate region tools that sit side by side in the Texture step. Color ID assigns a library material to each region and builds the layers directly — it doesn't run the AI. AI Auto-Texture instead textures the whole model from a single prompt.
Image to material
Have a photo of a surface? Image to Material turns a single picture into a full, tiling PBR material — estimating base color, normal, roughness, metallic and height — and drops it onto your stack as a material layer. Find it in the add-layer menu, or press ⌘⇧I. It is the fastest way to match a real-world surface you have a reference for.

One photo becomes a full PBR set — base color, normal, roughness and height — ready to tile and edit.
Channels
A material is a stack of channels, each describing one physical property of the surface. Five are always present on every project: Base Color (the surface's plain colour), Normal (fine bumps that catch the light), Height (depth), Roughness (matte versus glossy) and Metallic (non-metal versus metal). These five are what the viewport shades with and what every export preset expects.
Three more are opt-in, switched on per layer in the Properties panel. Emissive makes a surface give off its own light — paint it, or set one flat colour for the whole layer — and it honours blend modes, so stacking a glow with Add or Screen works as you'd expect. Opacity marks where the surface is solid or see-through, for leaves, grates and torn edges. Transmission carries light through the surface, for glass and thin foliage.
Each opt-in channel can hold a full map or a single flat value. A layer that just needs to be forty percent see-through takes the flat Opacity slider; a leaf that needs a cut-out shape takes a map. A channel no layer has enabled costs nothing — no texture is allocated and it appears nowhere in the interface — so leaving all three off is the same as them not existing.
Where Transmission shows up
Transmission appears in the Ray path-traced preview and in your exported maps, but the fast raster viewport does not render it. To judge glass live on the model, use the per-part Glass role in the Mesh tab — that one previews in real time.
Importing a texture set picks the opt-in channels up automatically from file names — emissive, emission, opacity, alpha, transmission and the usual variants — the same way base colour and roughness are matched. On export they are written as their own maps, and Opacity is additionally packed into the base colour's alpha for glTF and GLB, which is where those formats expect to find it.
Node materials
A node material builds a surface from a graph instead of a picture. Generator nodes make patterns, filter nodes shape them, blend nodes combine them, and the result drives every PBR channel at once. Because each step stays live, changing one number re-derives the whole material — which is what makes procedural surfaces worth building: brick whose grout darkens with occlusion, paint that chips along edges, rust that pools in the low spots.
Open one in two ways. Add Layer → Node Material starts a fresh graph, and any existing material layer offers Edit as Nodes in its ⋯ menu, which rebuilds that layer as a graph you can take further. Either way the editor opens full-screen over the workspace, with the node canvas in the middle, the library of nodes on one side and the selected node's parameters on the other.
Add Layer

The library covers the working set: fractal noise, cell patterns and gradients to generate from; blur, levels, curves and hue/saturation to shape; directional and domain warps to break up regularity; mirrors, blends and height blend to combine; normal-map tools, channel split and combine, and plain arithmetic. Wire any output into any compatible input and the preview updates as you go — it refines while you drag a slider and settles to full resolution when you stop.
The nodes that make a material feel like it belongs on your model are the mesh maps. Once the model is baked, its ambient occlusion, curvature, cavity, edge wear, slope, world position and world normal are all available as graph inputs — so 'dirt in the crevices' is a blend masked by occlusion, and 'worn along the edges' is a blend masked by curvature, placed automatically wherever those features fall on that particular mesh.
Published settings are the material's variables — the few knobs someone should be able to turn without opening the graph at all. Select a node and every setting in the inspector gains a small slider glyph in the gutter beside it; click one and that parameter is published. Published settings collect in their own panel under the inspector, where you can rename them to something a stranger would understand, group them into sections, drag them into the order you want, and narrow the range to the values that make sense for this material — a tile count that stops at 8 rather than 64. All of that is metadata: renaming a knob or reordering the list never changes a pixel, so nothing has to re-evaluate.
Back in the main editor, the layer's own panel shows those variables and nothing else — so a finished material reads as a handful of deliberate controls rather than a graph. Numbers, colours, toggles and dropdowns can all be published; curve and ramp editors stay inside the graph, since they're editors rather than single rows.
Publish before you save
A material is worth reusing in proportion to how adjustable it is from outside. Publish scale, wear amount and a colour or two before saving to your library, and the next model gets a material you can retune in seconds instead of a graph you have to re-read.
What comes out is an ordinary layer. It takes masks and blend modes, sits in the stack with your painted and library layers, participates in height blend, and exports in the same map set — there is no separate publish step. Save it to your library from the editor's header and the recipe travels with it, so it reopens as an editable graph on the next model rather than as flat baked maps.
Node editor
- Add a node
- Tab
- Rename the selected node
- F2
- Bypass / re-enable a node
- M
- Pin a node to the preview
- P
- Select everything connected
- L
- Fit the whole graph
- F
- Frame the selection
- .
Coming from Substance Designer
The graph model is the same one you know, and the node editor is free on every account. Mixos cannot open .sbs or .sbsar files, so an existing Designer graph has to be rebuilt — but its baked output imports as a normal map set like any other material.
Import your own maps
Already have a PBR set from another tool or a marketplace? The Library's Import tab loads your own texture maps — base color, normal, roughness, metallic and height — as a material layer. Bring them in one at a time, or point at a folder and Mixos matches the maps by name.
Drop in the maps you already have — base color, normal, roughness and the rest — and Mixos matches them by name into one material layer.
Note
Supported map images are PNG, JPG, WEBP, BMP, GIF and AVIF. Mixos matches maps by their file names, flips a DirectX normal map to its own convention automatically, and asks for separate roughness and metallic files rather than a packed ORM. Once imported, a map set behaves like any other material layer — re-tint it, mask it, stack filters on it.
Painting
Tools & the tool rail
When you want hand control, paint straight onto the model. A vertical tool rail down the left edge of the viewport holds the three brush tools — Paint, Clone and Mask — and stays visible the whole session. Select is the default tool: it orbits the camera and picks parts.
The brush & the eraser
Add a paint layer and the brush toolbar appears across the top of the viewport. Size, Flow, Opacity and Hardness shape every stroke; the eraser (or the Paint / Erase switch) removes paint from the active layer. Strokes wrap around the surface in real time, and you can paint in 2D or Split mode to reach awkward spots.
The dynamics menu goes further. Smoothing steadies a shaky stroke, Spacing sets how densely the tip repeats, Scatter jitters it for organic speckle, and Angle and Size jitter randomise each stamp's rotation and scale for a more hand-varied result.
On a tablet, the pen-pressure toggle drives brush size and opacity together. Lock transparency confines strokes to what is already painted on the layer — shade a shape you have laid down without spilling over its edges. And the eyedropper picks up any colour on screen to paint with.
Paint channels & colour
Choose which channels a stroke writes to — base color, roughness, metallic and height — so one pass can be just colour, just a roughness change, or all of them at once. Each enabled channel gets its own amount, and height is bipolar: paint it positive to raise the surface, negative to carve into it. Set the colour and a blend mode for the paint layer, and mask the layer to confine your work to part of the surface.
This stroke writes to Base Color.
One pass can be just colour, just a roughness change, or all of them at once — you choose per stroke.
Note
A paint layer holds its own stack of paint sublayers — add, duplicate, reorder, lock or clear them — so you can keep, say, a base coat and a grime pass separate within one layer.
Symmetry & brush keys
Turn on mirror painting to texture symmetrical models in half the time: press M to mirror your strokes across the X axis, or Shift+M for the Y axis, and every dab is echoed on the opposite side. It works for painting colour and for painting masks.
Most brush settings have a key, so you needn't leave the model. Use [ and ] to resize the brush and Shift+[ / Shift+] for hardness. Hold B (size) or O (opacity) and drag left or right in the viewport to scrub either one live. Press P to pick up the paint tool; once painting, B returns the brush to paint mode, E switches to the eraser, and X swaps between the two.
The full list
Every shortcut is collected in the Reference chapter, and you can pull up a cheatsheet inside the editor at any time by pressing ?.
Brush tips & texture brushes
Beyond a round brush, Mixos has texture brushes and custom brush tips — stamp grime, scratches, fibres, lettering or any shape as you paint. Pick from the built-in tips in the brush toolbar (there are around twenty — edge scuffs, fine scratches, fingerprints, rain streaks and more), upload your own image as a tip, or generate a new brush tip or texture brush from a prompt in the Library's Generate tab. Anything you add joins your library, ready to reuse across projects.
The clone tool
The clone tool is a stamp for textures: it copies the surface from one place on the model to another, following the geometry as you paint. Pick it from the tool rail (or press S), Alt-click the model to anchor a source point, then paint — every dab samples from the source, offset by the same distance as your stroke, exactly like a clone stamp in a 2D image editor but wrapped around the mesh.
It copies the full material, not just colour: roughness, metallic and height come across from the source too, with per-channel toggles for what the stamp carries. Because every pixel is sampled rather than painted, there is no colour to set — just the usual brush controls and the channels you want the stamp to carry. Clone strokes land on their own Retouch layer, created automatically, so the fixes stay separate and can be masked, reordered or thrown away like any other layer.
What it's for
Erasing seams, logos and scan artifacts, evening out a photographed texture, or repeating detail across a surface without retiling. Re-anchor the source (Alt-click again) whenever you move to a new area.
Masks
How masks work
A mask decides where a layer shows. White reveals, black hides, grey partially blends. Add a mask to any layer — material, paint or adjustment — and only the masked areas of that layer affect the surface. Masks are the key to a believable, layered surface rather than one flat texture.
A mask isn't a single image but a small stack of its own: each entry in the stack combines with the ones below by Multiply (keeps the overlap), Add (combines coverage) or Subtract (cuts it out), and each can be inverted. The preview shows the composited result, black-and-white, so you always know exactly where the layer will show.
Edge Wear
Worn edges
Dirt
From an image
Curvature
Edges from normals
Drag to reveal the rust layer. The mask on the right — white shows, black hides — decides exactly where it appears.
Adding masks
Open a layer's Masks tab and pick a mask type. There are eleven to choose from, and they fall into three groups: hand-driven (Paint and Image), procedural (Noise, Gradient, Slope, Cavity and Curvature), and geometry-aware (Edge Wear, Mesh AO, Exposed Edges and Mesh Curvature) — the last group reads your baked maps, so it stays locked until you bake.
Whatever type you pick, a common set of edit controls keeps it in check: Invert flips what shows, Brightness and Contrast tighten or loosen the pattern, and a Levels panel sets its black and white points — so a mask rarely needs repainting to fit your model. Geometry masks add a Blur to soften their edges.
Paint & procedural masks
For full control, paint a mask by hand: brush white where you want the layer to show and black where you want it hidden, with the same size, flow and hardness controls as painting colour. Paint masks combine with the rest — start from a noise mask, then paint parts in or out.
The procedural types generate resolution-independent patterns you can dial in. Noise offers ten flavours — fBM, Voronoi, marble, wood rings and more — with scale, octaves and a seed. A Gradient mask is a directional ramp you shape with a multi-stop editor: click the bar to add a stop, drag it off to remove it, and set each stop's brightness.
Masks from baked maps
Drive a mask straight from the geometry. Because Mixos baked curvature and ambient-occlusion maps, it can place a layer exactly on the model's edges (Edge Wear and Exposed Edges, for paint chipping and wear) or in its cavities (Mesh AO, for dirt and grime) — the same technique smart materials use, available on any layer you like. Edge Wear even has an Amount macro and a Chipping control to break the wear up naturally.
Wear lands on the rim, where edges catch knocks.
These need a bake
The four geometry-aware mask types read the baked maps, so they stay disabled until the mesh is baked. Bake first (see Your model → Bake mesh maps) and they light up.
Grunge & weathering masks
The mask library is full of ready-made grunge and weathering masks — dirt, grime, soot, dust, rust, scratches, scuff marks, fingerprints, moss and more — grouped by what they do: Dirt & Grime, Rust & Wear, Edges & Paint, Water & Stains and Organic. Drop one onto a layer and it instantly confines that layer to a believable, irregular pattern; tweak its scale and contrast to taste.

Generate a mask
Need a specific pattern? Describe it and generate a black-and-white mask — a weathering pass, a splatter, a custom wear pattern — straight from a prompt, either from the box at the top of the mask library or from the Library's Generate tab. It saves to your library and applies to the selected layer, ready to scale and refine. Generating a mask costs one AI credit and needs you to be signed in.
Decals
Decals
Decals stamp an image — a logo, a sticker, a sign, a label — onto the surface without committing it to the texture. Choose Decal from the add-layer menu (or press D) and pick your own image, or generate one from a prompt in the Library's Generate tab; then move, rotate and scale it on the model with the on-mesh handles until it sits right. A small toolbar lets you lock the aspect ratio while scaling, restore the image's ratio, or reset the transform.
Note
Decals project onto the surface, so they wrap around curves and follow the model rather than floating flat. Each decal is its own layer, so you can blend it, mask it and reorder it like everything else — and edit it at any time by selecting its layer.
A decal is not limited to colour. In its Properties, Generate Maps derives normal, roughness, metallic and height from the decal's own image in one pass, so the sticker also embosses and glosses the surface — or swap in your own map for any channel for full control. A fresh decal starts as colour only, so a channel does nothing until it has a map.
AI tools
AI Auto-Texture
Short on time, or after a starting point? Describe a look in plain language and AI Auto-Texture paints the whole model in a single pass. The result lands as ordinary layers you can keep editing by hand. You'll find it in the Mesh tab, as the Texture step of the setup checklist — it unwraps and bakes the model for you first if needed, so a freshly imported mesh is one prompt away from textured.

Describe a look and let AI Auto-Texture paint the whole model in one pass — then refine it by hand. (Try “rusted iron”, “oak”, “mossy stone”.)
Multi-part models are combined first
Auto-Texture paints the model as one surface, so a multi-part model is combined into a single mesh before texturing. If you've already built layers on individual parts, that work is replaced and the combine can't be undone — Mixos asks first. Run Auto-Texture first and refine on top, or keep the parts separate and texture them by hand.
Generate materials, masks & brushes
Open the Library and switch to its Generate tab to turn a prompt into reusable assets: a full PBR material, a texture brush, a decal, a weathering mask, a custom brush tip — or a variation of a material you already have. Pick what to create at the top of the panel, type a prompt, and generate; the result saves to your library for reuse across projects.
Generate a material, texture brush, decal, weathering mask, brush tip, or a variation of one you already have.
Credits & sign-in
AI generation runs on credits and needs you to be signed in — a material costs a couple of credits (a 2K material is a Pro feature), and masks, decals, brushes and variations cost one. Everything else in this manual — importing, baking, materials, painting, masking and decals — works with no account at all.
Free-plan generations are shared publicly
On the free plan, the materials, textures, decals and weathering masks you generate with AI are added anonymously to the public Community library — you always keep your own copy. Upgrade to Pro or Max to keep your generations private.
Finish & share
Export
When the look is right, click Export at the top right of the menu bar to export a clean PBR map set. Pick your target and Mixos sets the correct normal-map convention and packing for you, then bundles everything into a ZIP that drops straight into your scene.
Target App
Renderers
DCC & Engines
Generic
Normal convention: OpenGL
Format & Precision
Channels
- 1Choose a target — Renderers (Arnold, V-Ray, Octane, Corona), DCC & engines (Cinema 4D / Redshift, Blender / Unity, Unreal Engine) or Generic PBR for everything else. Unreal writes a packed ORM map (occlusion, roughness and metallic in one texture) and uses the DirectX normal convention; the rest use OpenGL.
- 2Set format & resolution — 8-bit PNG for everyday use, 16-bit PNG, or floating-point EXR when height and normal need real precision — and 1024, 2048 or 4096. These pickers appear on a paid plan; the free plan exports a watermarked 512px preview.
- 3Pick channels & options — Under “More export options”, tick exactly which channels to include, add a .glb of the mesh, and override the normal convention if your engine expects the other one.
Resolution & precision are on paid plans
The free plan exports a watermarked preview capped to 512 px. Full-resolution export (up to 4K) with no watermark, in the format you choose, is a Pro, Max or Team feature.
For a model made of several parts, you can export one independent texture set per part or pack them into a single combined atlas with the UVs remapped into a grid — the choice appears automatically once Mixos detects a multi-part mesh in per-object mode.
What the export bakes
Exported maps are written from the UV layout, so anything that only lives in the live 3D preview — object-space projection modes and adjustment-layer filters — isn't baked in yet, and the files can look different from the viewport. Painted layers, tiling scale and the UV transform do bake. The dialog flags exactly what will be dropped before you export.
Review share links
Instead of sending files, share a link. From the export dialog, create a review link and anyone who opens it sees your textured model in their browser — spinning, lit, no account and no install required. It's the quickest way to get sign-off from a client or art director without an export-and-email round trip.
Anyone with the link opens your model in a browser — no account, no install. Revoke it any time.
Note
Choose View only for a read-only 3D viewer, or Can edit to let a signed-in teammate open the project source in their own editor. Review links need a saved project and cloud storage, so you'll be signed in; you can revoke any link, and it stops opening for everyone.
Live Link to Blender, Cinema 4D & Unreal
On the desktop app, you can skip the export loop entirely. The Live Link button in the toolbar streams your material straight into Blender, Cinema 4D or Unreal Engine while you paint: with Auto Sync on, your base color, roughness, metallic, normal and height maps land on the linked object a moment after every change — wired into a Principled BSDF in Blender, a Redshift Standard material in Cinema 4D, and a ready-made material graph in Unreal.
1 · Set up
Plugin connected — you're all set. Paint and it streams to Blender.
2 · Sync
Setup is one click for Blender and Cinema 4D: open Live Link, click Install, and Mixos finds the install and places the plugin — restart the app and the link connects itself. Blender is fully two-way: press Send to Mixos in Blender's sidebar to bring a model over for texturing, and synced maps land back on that same object. For Unreal, drop the plugin folder into your project's Plugins directory once.
Desktop app only
The Live Link ships with the free desktop app for Mac and Windows — in the browser you export map sets or share review links instead. The connection runs entirely on your machine over the local loopback address; nothing is uploaded. The full walkthrough is in the Blender Live Link guide.
Save & account
Editing never needs an account. Sign in with Google or an email magic link to save your project to the cloud, reopen it on any device, and unlock full-resolution export and the AI features.
You don't have to remember to save. Mixos autosaves your work to the browser a few seconds after you stop editing — kept separately from your named projects so it can never overwrite an explicit save — and if a tab closes unexpectedly it offers to recover the draft when you return. Press ⌘S (Ctrl+S) to save at any time; while you're signed in, your projects sync to the cloud so they follow you between devices.

Saved projects live in the dashboard, where each one can be renamed or duplicated. Duplicate before a risky experiment and the original stays untouched — a cheap way to branch a look and compare.
Reference
Tips for a great result
Bake first, always
The curvature and ambient-occlusion maps are what place wear, dirt and smart-material detail correctly — and the geometry masks stay locked until you bake. Bake before you texture.
Think in layers and masks
A base material, a masked layer of edge wear, and a pass of dirt is far easier to tweak and undo than one flattened texture.
Inspect channels
Use the viewport channel strip to check Base Color, Normal and Roughness on their own — it makes problems obvious before you export.
Retune on the layer, not above it
The Look controls (roughness, metallic, colour) bake into the export; adjustment-layer filters don't yet. For anything that must ship in the maps, prefer the layer's own controls.
Keyboard shortcuts
Mixos is quick once the keys are in your hands. These work whenever the editor — not a text field — has focus. On Windows and Linux use Ctrl where ⌘ is shown.
Camera
- Orbit the camera
- Left-drag
- Pan the camera
- Right-drag
- Zoom to cursor
- Scroll
- Pan the 2D / UV view
- Middle-drag
View
- View a single channel
- 12345
- Full PBR view
- 0
- Toggle 3D / 2D
- Tab
- Frame the model
- F
Tools
- Select
- V
- Artist Paint
- P
- Paint with brush
- B
- Decal
- D
- Clone (Alt-click sets the source)
- S
- Erase
- E
- Swap paint & erase
- X
Brush
- Size
- []
- Hardness
- Shift[]
- Scrub size / opacity (hold + drag)
- BO
- Pick colour (eyedropper)
- Altclick
- Mirror X / Y
- MShift M
Layers
- New layer
- ⌘N
- Duplicate layer
- ⌘D
- Delete layer
- DeleteBackspace
- Import photo as material
- ⌘ShiftI
Decals
- Move / scale / rotate
- Drag handles
- Scale uniformly (lock aspect)
- Shiftscale
- Snap rotation to 15°
- Shiftrotate
Project
- Undo
- ⌘Z
- Redo
- ⌘ShiftZ
- Save project
- ⌘S
- Open the cheatsheet
- ?
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to install anything?+
No. Mixos runs entirely in your browser on WebGPU — nothing to download and no drivers to manage. If you want it, a free desktop app for Mac and Windows adds faster bakes, native ML inference and full offline support, but nothing requires it.
Which file formats can I import?+
GLB, GLTF, FBX and OBJ models up to 150 MB, and PNG, JPG, WEBP, BMP, GIF or AVIF for texture maps and decals.
Which engines can I export to?+
PBR map sets tuned for Cinema 4D, Blender / Unity, Unreal and renderers like Arnold, V-Ray, Octane and Corona — plus a Generic PBR preset that works in Godot and any other PBR tool — each with the right normal-map convention (and packed ORM where the engine expects it).
Do I need to know how to UV unwrap?+
No. Mixos reuses clean UVs or generates non-overlapping islands with one click.
Can I paint by hand as well as use materials?+
Yes — add a paint layer and paint directly onto the model, control which channels each stroke writes to, and mask it, alongside or on top of library materials.
Can I bring in my own materials and textures?+
Yes. Import a full PBR map set (or a folder of maps), turn a single photo into a tiling material with Image to Material, or stamp your own images as decals.
Is Mixos free?+
Authoring is free and needs no account. A free account exports a 512px watermarked preview and includes trial AI credits; Pro and Max unlock full-resolution (4K), watermark-free export, more AI credits, and cloud storage.
Everything here is one tab away — import a model and take it to render-ready maps, free.
Open Paint