Platform, Performance & FAQ

Platform & render-pipeline support

	Details
Unity version	2021.3 or newer
Dependency	com.deepwave.core
Render pipelines	Built-in, URP and HDRP — built on Unity's standard CommandBuffer / Graphics.Blit rendering; a detector identifies the active pipeline at runtime
Rendering formats	Automatic format resolution with a documented fallback path for platforms lacking floating-point render-target support (relevant for WebGL)

Performance architecture

Simple Painter is built around a single-pass-per-frame command architecture rather than scattered per-draw calls:

• One command buffer per frame — every GPU operation is a pooled command bucketed into five ordered phases (Setup → Process → Draw → Commit → Composition), recorded once and submitted with a single execute call; frames with no paint activity submit nothing.
• Pooling throughout — commands, command buffers, materials, shared meshes and solid-colour textures are all rented and reused.
• Render-texture pooling — persistent simulation buffers reallocate only when their format/size changes; scratch buffers use Unity's temporary RT pool; ping-pong pairs standardise multi-pass simulation.
• Upfront shader warm-up — a SimulationCanvas compiles every shader variant its current configuration will draw once, at scene load, instead of stalling the player's first stroke.
• Job System batch raycasting — dense stroke sampling switches to parallel job-scheduled raycasts once the batch is large enough to benefit.
• Async GPU readback — the Progress Tracker uses non-blocking AsyncGPUReadback, so it never stalls the main thread.
• Guaranteed VRAM teardown — every pooled render texture and cached solid texture is released on shutdown.

See PaintEngine & Performance for the full breakdown.

Runtime tips

• Hot-swap, don't mutate assets. Use PaintTool.SwitchInput(...) and PaintTool.SwitchPaint(...) to change behaviour at runtime instead of editing the shared ScriptableObject, which would affect every reference.
• One tool active at a time. A PaintDrawer runs exactly one DrawConfig; swap it rather than stacking tools.
• Size buffers per object. Set each Paintable's Texture Size to match how close the camera gets — background props rarely need 2048².
• Pick the cheapest canvas that fits. Reach for SingleTargetCanvas when you only need one channel and no layers — it skips the whole compositing step.
• Match the solver to the look, not just the budget. Fluid Film is the cheapest of the three simulations, but Viscous and Ink both produce visibly different behaviour — pick by look first, then verify the cost on your target platform.

Frequently asked questions

Can I paint more than colour — like metallic, roughness or normal maps? Yes. Painting is organised around channels, each bound to any shader property and typed as Color, Scalar or Normal, each with its own layer stack.

Does it support layers, like an image editor? Yes, on a MultiChannelCanvas or SimulationCanvas — every channel holds visibility/opacity/starting-texture/blend-mode layers (8 blend modes for Color, 5 for Scalar, 7 for Normal). A SingleTargetCanvas skips layers for the cheapest possible setup.

Can I paint on an animated or skinned character? Yes. Paintable bakes the live SkinnedMeshRenderer pose once per frame, and PaintableLink lets bone-following proxy colliders forward hits to the real target.

Is there a wet-paint or fluid effect? Yes — three of them. Add a SimulationCanvas plus one solver: Fluid Viscous (adhesion, viscosity, cohesive pressure), Fluid Ink (a swirling, vorticity-confined bloom), or Fluid Film (a cheap drip-and-dry height field). All three run as an iterative GPU simulation on top of whatever you paint.

What happens at UV seams? Nothing — every PaintCanvas detects seams geometrically and bakes a correction automatically, so paint bleeds correctly across islands instead of stopping at the cut. There's no separate component to add.

Can I measure how much of an object has been painted? Yes, with PaintProgressTracker on any canvas type — a live 0–100% ratio (fill or erase, coverage or value/colour based), optionally masked to the real UV footprint, with an event and scene-wide aggregation.

Which input devices are supported? Mouse, pressure-sensitive Pen, Touch (single-touch), physics Collision impacts, Particle-system collisions (landing or pass-through), and a transform-driven Object device for rollers, stamps and carried decals.

Can I paint without casting a ray — say, from a moving object? Yes, with ObjectInputConfig. It samples a transform's pose every frame (or on demand via PaintTool.Stamp()) and paints every paintable its stamp box overlaps.

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