The Mixos manual

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, Unreal, Unity, Godot, and more — no install, no drivers, no upload wait.

This manual covers the whole studio, chapter by chapter: the interface and viewport, then materials, painting, masks, decals and the AI tools, and finally export. Read it top to bottom the first time; afterwards each section stands on its own.

The editor is a single screen built from a few panels. Everything you need is one click away — there are no separate windows or modes to switch between.

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 viewport fills the centre. The Properties panel on the right edits whatever is selected. The menu bar across the top holds the view controls, import, export and your account; the status bar along the bottom reports mesh and texture stats.

The viewport is a live, physically based render. Orbit by dragging, pan with a right- or middle-drag, and zoom with the scroll wheel; press F or the Frame button to recentre on 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.

3D2DSplit

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, Metallic or Opacity — on its own. It is a preview only and never paints; use it to inspect exactly what a map contains.

An HDRI environment lights the scene. Choose a preset or upload your own .hdr or .exr to judge a material under the lighting it will ship in — studio, sunset, overcast and more.

Exposure and environment intensity set how bright the lighting reads, and you can show the HDRI as the background or keep a clean studio backdrop. The display sliders — brightness, contrast, saturation — tune the viewport only.

Mixos opens with a lit sphere and a default material, so you can start painting immediately. The Shape control in the menu bar swaps the sphere for a cube, plane or cylinder when you just need a surface to test a material on.

SphereCubePlaneCylinder

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 and loads geometry only — materials are something you build here.

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.

Unwrap to UV layout

Unwrapping lays the surface flat into non-overlapping islands — the map you paint onto. Mixos does it in one click.

Baking projects the model's geometry into a set of maps — curvature, ambient occlusion, thickness and edge wear. These describe where edges, cavities and thin areas are, and they are what let smart materials place wear and grime convincingly.

Texturing in Mixos is non-destructive: everything stacks as layers, top to bottom, and each one blends over the ones beneath. The add menu offers every layer type.

A material (fill) layer is a whole PBR material. A paint layer is hand-painted strokes. A blank layer is an empty canvas to build up. An adjustment layer retunes everything below it. A decal stamps an image onto the surface. And a group folds related layers together so you can move, blend and mask them as one.

Every layer carries a blend mode and an opacity. Drag to reorder — higher layers cover lower ones — hide or lock a layer while you work, and fold passes that belong together into a group with its own blend and opacity.

Because nothing is flattened until export, you can return to any layer at any time and retune it without redoing the work above it.

An adjustment layer corrects everything beneath it without touching those layers directly. Stack as many filters as you like on one — Levels, Curves, Hue / Saturation / Lightness, Brightness & Contrast, Blur, Sharpen, Invert, Posterize and Gradient Map — each neutral until you change it.

Filters can target specific channels, so you can, for example, lift only the roughness or shift only the base-color hue. Add a mask to the adjustment to confine the correction to part of the model.

Open the library 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.

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. Applying one adds a group to your stack that you can open up and retune like any other layer.

A Color ID map paints each part of the model a flat, distinct colour so you can mask by region — all the metal trim, all the rubber, all the glass — in one click. Assign a material to a colour and it fills exactly those parts, no hand-masking required.

Have a photo of a surface? Image to Material turns a single picture into a full, tiling PBR material — estimating base color, normal, roughness and height — and drops it onto your stack as a material layer. It is the fastest way to match a real-world surface you have a reference for.

Generate maps

One photo becomes a full PBR set — base color, normal, roughness and height — ready to tile and edit.

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, height, AO — as a material layer. Bring them in one at a time, or point at a folder and Mixos matches the maps by name.

When you want hand control, paint straight onto the model. Add a paint layer and the brush toolbar appears across the top of the viewport with size, flow, opacity and hardness; the eraser 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.

Choose which channels a stroke writes to — base color, roughness, metallic, height — so one pass can be just colour, just a roughness change, or all of them at once. Set the colour and a blend mode for the paint layer, and mask the layer to confine your work to part of the surface.

Beyond a round brush, Mixos has texture brushes and custom brush tips — stamp grime, scratches, lettering or any shape as you paint. You can generate a new brush tip or a texture brush from a prompt and it joins your library, ready to reuse across projects.

A mask decides where a layer shows. Black hides, white reveals, 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 building a believable, layered surface rather than one flat texture.

The mask library is full of procedural and noise masks — dirt, grime, soot, dust, rust, scratches, scuff marks, fingerprints and edge wear — grouped by what they do. Drop one onto a layer and it instantly confines that layer to a believable, irregular pattern; tweak its scale and contrast to taste.

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 procedural ones — start from a noise mask, then paint in or out the parts you want.

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 (for paint chipping and wear) or in its cavities (for dirt and grime) — the same technique smart materials use, available on any layer you like.

Need a specific pattern? Describe it and generate a mask — a weathering pass, a splatter, a custom wear pattern — straight from a prompt. It lands as a mask on the selected layer, ready to scale and refine.

Decals stamp an image — a logo, a sticker, a sign, a label — onto the surface without committing it to the texture. Add a decal from your own image or generate one from a prompt, then move, rotate and scale it on the model until it sits right. Each decal is its own layer, so you can blend it, mask it and reorder it like everything else.

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, or use a Color ID to mask the model by region first. The result lands as ordinary layers you can keep editing by hand.

The Generate panel turns a prompt into reusable assets: a full PBR material, a weathering mask, a texture brush or a custom brush tip. You can also ask for a variation of a material you already have to explore alternatives without starting over. Generated assets save to your library for reuse across projects.

When the look is right, export a clean PBR map set. Pick your target engine and Mixos sets the correct normal-map convention and bit depth for you, then packs everything into a ZIP that drops straight into your scene.

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.