Instead of painting the edge, you trace it with bezier curves, and you can move it again whenever you want. Shapes are drawn on the model in the 3D viewport or on the UV layout in the split view, they stack, and they combine with boolean operations — Union, Subtract, Intersect and Replace. Each one can be a fill, a stroke with a thickness or a ring.

What sets it apart from a painted mask is the per-point feather: every point on the curve carries its own softening handle, which is not a blur on top but a second curve, as in Nuke. The same contour can have a hard edge in one corner and fade softly on the opposite side, keeping its shape instead of rounding it off.

A seam is not a projected image: it is a curve that lives inside the effect and can be re-edited whenever you want. You draw it onto the model in the 3D viewport or on the UV layout in the split view, and stitches from one space are respected while editing in the other.

The editor uses the keys you already know from Blender: G, R and S move, rotate and scale the whole seam; E starts a new one; Shift + D duplicates it; and inside the stroke you get point insertion with Ctrl, per-point pressure with S, straightening by double click and a Ctrl + Z of its own.

The mirror is not a flat copy: the mirrored seam is projected onto the actual geometry of the other side, so it follows the model even where it is not perfectly symmetrical. And Auto Stitch sews the whole unwrap along the model's UV seams — a switch with state, where every setting rebuilds the seams in place, producing real, individually editable seams.

There is no global projects folder any more. A project is created next to your .blend file and, on save, its textures are packed inside it with relative paths. Opening it on another machine rebuilds the folder next to the file on its own, with nothing to press.

Projects you already had keep working exactly as before, and the panel offers a Make Self-Contained button to move them to the new model whenever you want — one that copies, it does not move: the old folder stays intact until you delete it yourself.

Mask Auto-Cache. Caching a mask used to mean locking it. Now, move a slider on a cached mask and it un-caches instantly so you see the change live, then re-bakes the moment you release the mouse. The UI is no longer greyed out, and the system understands paint mode too: it un-caches on entry, re-caches on exit, and swaps by itself when you switch paint layers.

Cascading Effect Auto-Update. Changing something below a baked filter (blur, bevel, slope blur, sharpen, highpass) used to leave its texture stale. Now MatPlus re-bakes everything that depended on the change on its own, in the right order: the effects above it in the same chain, the consumers of a Link in other layers and channels, and the affected cached masks, which are un-cached once and re-cached a single time at the end of the pass.

Skew is that distortion that shows up near corners and bevels when projecting from the high poly to the low poly: a rivet that twists as it approaches an edge, lettering that stretches around a curve.

The Skew Correction toggle bakes a second version of each projected map with the rays perpendicular to each face, and then you paint over it with Paint Fix to reveal that version exactly where it is needed. Apply writes the correction into the normal map itself while keeping the original bake aside, so you can repaint and apply again without it piling up.

And when the detail comes from a Multiresolution modifier instead of a separate high poly, the From Multires checkbox adds three more passes: Multires Normal, Multires Displacement and Multires Vector Disp.

Painting the skew correction with Paint Fix.

The same rivets, before and after: no more twisting as they approach the edge.

Output Templates. Complete export presets, Substance Painter style, with nineteen factory formats: Unreal (Packed), Unity URP and HDRP, glTF 2.0, Godot 4 (ORM), CryEngine, X-Plane, Roblox, Arnold, Redshift, RenderMan, V-Ray, KeyShot and more. Stored on disk, so you configure them once and use them across every project.

Flatten Group. Flattening a group is no longer a one-way trip. It bakes every channel of the group into a single layer and switches the folder off, but leaves a button in the group's row to go in and edit it and to update it again as many times as you need, plus Remove Flatten to undo it entirely.

• Environment: HDRI gallery with thumbnails, search, and rotation, opacity, background colour and exposure controls.
• Camera: a MatPlus-managed camera with lens, type and depth of field.
• Compositer Effects: a post-processing chain with ten combinable effects (bloom, glare, vignette, grain, chromatic aberration, colour correction...).
• Viewport: the MatPlus Viewport toggle, which switches off the overlays that get in the way while texturing, plus wireframe, shadow, raytracing and performance controls.

With Add Custom Texture you pick one or several images from disk, MatPlus copies them into your library, generates their thumbnails automatically and makes them available under the Custom category of every texture gallery: fill effects, material channels, intelligent masks, decals...

The paths have been unified too: there is now a single preference, MatPlus Textures, inside which every first-level subfolder is a library. Adding a new library is creating a folder.

• Progress bars everywhere. Map baking, exporting and the Smart Material / Smart Mask operations no longer leave Blender looking frozen. Exporting also leaves a summary: how many textures came out, how long it took, what failed and why.
• MP Stats. The real weight of the active material in three figures — shader nodes, texture memory, and live versus cached masks — with the before/after delta for operations like Flatten.
• Clean. Deletes the textures in the project folder that no layer refers to anymore, showing you the list and the space you are about to reclaim.
• Copying and pasting layers and groups. A layer clipboard that works within the same material and across different materials in the project, with layers and with whole groups.
• Everything scrolls, and a layer search. Every gallery has its own scrollable box, and the layers toolbar has a search field that filters layers and groups across the whole project — including those inside closed folders.
• Independent brushes per layer. Every paint layer and paint effect remembers its own brush size, hardness and texture.
• Duplicating individual effects from the three-dot menu or with Ctrl + D.
• Per-channel work format, so each channel picks the pixel format MatPlus bakes it with internally (sRGB8, L8, L16, RGB16F...), independently of the export format.
• Combined export. The Combine Materials option exports several materials into a single texture set.
• Independent Displacement channel, split off from Height and activated on its own.

It stacks seven sources into a single mask — Thickness, Position Gradient, World Space Normal, Curvature, Ambient Occlusion and two textures — each with its own blend mode, opacity, invert and levels, plus a Global block at the very top. The factory values are Substance's: the geometric ones on Add, occlusion on Multiply and textures on Overlay.

The two vector layers bring their three axes separately, the curvature one brings the Mode dropdown and the four scales, and the texture ones their gallery with UV or triplanar projection. Blending curvature with occlusion and a grunge stops being a chain of four effects.

That is what trims, piping, clean lines along the cut, seam wear and seam hiding are made of, without painting the outline by hand.

It is the only one that needs nothing baked: its map is computed from the UVs themselves in a fraction of a second when you assign the effect, so it is available from the start, on a brand new project. Its main control, Distance, is in UV units, not pixels: it means the same at 1K and at 4K.

Alongside the Curvature, MatPlus now bakes a second pass: four copies of the map measured at ever wider radii, packed into the four channels of a separate EXR and calibrated against Substance's.

They show up as four sliders on the Curvature mask, on Edge Wear, on Dirt and on the curvature layer of the Mask Generator. With a single scale, anything rounder than a texel lands on neutral grey and the wear comes out weak. There is nothing to tick — they come out of the same pass as the Curvature, they support UDIM, and in an older project without them they are generated on their own.