texturecraft/ROADMAP.md

TextureCraft roadmap

TextureCraft aims for 1:1 parity with Adobe Substance 3D Painter's texturing workflow, with better performance, a smaller footprint, every feature drivable by agents (MCP, CLI, control channel), and builds for Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD and the web.

Honest parity estimate (2026-11-02)

Weighted by how much of a professional's daily work each area carries. "Done" counts what works end to end today (engine + UI + automation + tests), not what is planned.

Area	Weight	Done	What works	Main gaps
Project and files	8	95%	New project from glTF/GLB, FBX (binary and ASCII, 6.x and 7.x), COLLADA, USD (usda, usdc, usdz), Alembic (Ogawa), OBJ, PLY, STL or built-in meshes (auto-unwrap when UVs are missing; a .gltf's buffers and images and a loose USD layer's textures are read from its folder and kept in the project), project templates (built-in and saved from a project), .tcraft open/save/save as/save a copy, autosave, asks to save unsaved changes before quitting or replacing the project (in the browser too, and before the tab closes), recent files, drag and drop, reimport mesh with strokes preserved on the surface, MaterialX import (file.importMaterialX: a .mtlx material with open_pbr_surface, standard_surface or gltf_pbr becomes one fill layer with its textures and values), image resources, remove unused resources, OBJ, textured GLB and USD mesh export, browser open/save/download	HDF5 Alembic; Alembic animation (first sample only)
Texture sets	6	95%	One set per material, UDIM / UV tiles (auto-detected or switched on later with resampling, a resolution per tile, one texture per tile at its own size, $udim export), list with visibility (show or hide all, invert, focus on one set), sizes 128–8192 with resampling, add/remove channels (19 channel types incl. coat, sheen, anisotropy and scattering), height strength, normal format	Filter radii and height slopes of a tile smaller than its atlas block follow the block; mesh maps from images need a set without UV tiles
Layer stack	16	98%	Paint, fill, folder and instance layers; 32 per-channel blend modes and opacities; white/black/painted masks with mask with height; generator, fill, levels (with a histogram of its input), invert/threshold, color selection, compare, blur, sharpen and HSL effects on masks and layer content; anchor points; effects dragged to reorder, duplicated, and copied, cut and pasted across layers, masks and sets (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+D and Delete act on a selected effect); smart masks; mask view (Alt+click); Alt+click a material channel to keep it alone; duplicate, group, drag to reorder, rename, color tags, copy/cut/paste (also as instance) across sets, flatten, instantiate across sets, save layers as smart materials; 30 library filters (adjustments incl. histogram scan, range and shift, blur/sharpen/high pass, bevel, glow, edge detect, warps, mosaic, baked lighting, material finishes); geometry masks (a layer on chosen mesh parts)	A few niche filters of the reference app's catalog
Painting tools	14	91%	Paint, eraser, projection with image stencils, polygon fill, path and lasso fill, smudge, clone, color picker, quick mask, Shift+click lines with preview, 2D view painting; size, flow, stroke opacity, spacing, hardness, angle, follow path, jitters, alignment, angle fade, backface culling, lazy mouse, Ctrl+drag in a view for size, hardness, flow and angle, X/Y/Z mirror and radial symmetry, pen pressure, procedural and image alphas, text in any installed font (as an alpha or a decal), particle brush	Pen tilt (not exposed by the windowing layer)
Materials and assets	8	90%	63 procedural materials (incl. car paint, velvet, brushed steel, skin, wax, ice, snow, bark), 21 smart materials, 18 smart masks, 67 procedural brush alphas, 18 brush presets plus user presets, 23 procedurals, 6 environments plus imported HDR/EXR panoramas, image resources, a user smart material library, a tabbed shelf with search and drag and drop onto layers and the viewport	A smaller bundled library than the reference app's
Baking	10	100%	AO, curvature (also from the normal map), thickness, world normal, position, ID, normal, height, bent normals, opacity, color map and world-space direction; high-poly meshes, cage, frontal/rear distances, average normals, match by mesh name; per-texture-set selection, common and per-map parameters, progress and cancel; Auto-rebake (bake.autoRebake: one map bakes itself again in the background when its bake settings, the low poly or the high polys change); mesh maps from images (baked elsewhere or edited) dropped on a slot; high-poly base color textures embedded or in files beside a .gltf, FBX or USD layer	—
Viewport and display	12	95%	PBR with image-based lighting, 6 procedural environments or imported HDR/EXR panoramas with exposure, rotation, blur, opacity, ACES/linear tone mapping, HDR pipeline with bloom, vignette, sharpen and grain, key-light shadows, 4× MSAA plus idle temporal accumulation, the baked normal map under the painted normal, channel / mesh-map / mask / UV checker views, 3D and 2D wireframes of the mesh's own polygons, brush cursor, axis gizmos, subsurface scattering blur, depth of field, saved cameras and cameras from glTF, FBX, COLLADA and USD files, displacement (also in shadows and the path tracers), path-traced Rendering mode (F10, on the GPU or the CPU) with environment importance sampling and an edge-aware denoiser; picks a discrete GPU on multi-GPU machines (--gpu, WGPU_ADAPTER_NAME, WGPU_POWER_PREF), and display textures are made on demand so a mesh with many materials imports on a small GPU	Hardware ray tracing
Shader	6	100%	Metallic/roughness and specular/glossiness PBR, clear coat, sheen, anisotropy and subsurface scattering (viewport and path tracer), height-to-normal, painted normals, parallax occlusion, emissive, opacity (dithered), AO intensity	—
Export	8	92%	10 presets (incl. Godot 4 and OpenPBR with every shading lobe) plus user output templates (per-channel packing, converted maps, JSON import/export), PNG/JPEG/TGA/TIFF/BMP/WEBP/EXR/HDR, 8/16/32-bit, padding modes, size override, OpenGL/DirectX normals, colour space of the colour maps (sRGB, Linear Rec.709, ACEScg, ACES2065-1; data maps never converted), $udim tiles, MaterialX (file.exportTextures with materialX: a .mtlx OpenPBR material per set, <UDIM> aware), OBJ, textured GLB (with clearcoat/sheen) and USD (with clear coat) mesh export, zip download in the browser	Sheen and anisotropy in USD (UsdPreviewSurface has no inputs for them; GLB and OpenPBR maps carry them)
UI and UX	8	97%	Painter-style layout with dockable, tabbed, floating panels, menus, tool shelf, tool bar, asset shelf, texture set list, layer stack with context menu, properties, display/shader/history/log panels, export dialog, new project dialog, bake mode, rendering mode, settings (interface scale, autosave, viewport texture resolution, system title bar), own title bar with the app icon and window buttons (Windows, GNOME; integrated with the macOS traffic lights), saved UI layouts, a History panel that jumps to any step (back or forward), a start window (new, open, recent projects), shortcut editor with conflict detection, tooltips with shortcuts, a compact color picker (saturation/value square, hue strip, copyable RGB); all menu items live (docs/parity.md); 10 UI languages with CJK and Arabic fonts (docs/localization-parity.md); closed panels reopen where they were; frame-budgeted compositing and uploads keep 8K sets responsive	Native-speaker review of the translations
Platforms	4	76%	Windows, macOS (universal, signed and notarized), Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm, tar.gz, Flatpak), FreeBSD and web release workflows	First real release run; web build polish
Total	100	≈ 94%

Beyond the reference app: every command is available to agents through MCP, the CLI and the app's control channel (MCP workspace tools cover every file action: projects, meshes, high polys and the cage, resources, smart materials, textures and mesh export), and the whole engine runs headless.

Remaining effort

Estimated in wall-clock hours of Claude Opus 5.5 agent work, with three or four agents working in parallel on separate crates:

Milestone	Scope	Estimate
M1 Layer stack depth	Done	0 h
M2 Tools	Pen tilt once the windowing layer reports it	0.5 h
M3 Assets	Done	0 h
M4 Baking	Done	0 h
M5 Viewport	Hardware ray tracing: wgpu's ray queries are experimental and need an unsafe opt-in, which the workspace forbids (owner decision)	1.5 h
M6 Shader	Done	0 h
M7 Formats	Done	0 h
M8 UX	Native review of translations	1 h
M9 Release	The twelve signing secrets and the Default runner group (org admin); first signed release run on every platform (v0.1.0); web deployment; Flathub submission	3 h
Total		≈ 6 h

Current focus

1. Release v0.1.0 (M9): CI (fmt, clippy, the full test suite, layering and wasm on Linux and Windows) is green on main, and the release environment and branch ruleset exist. Left: an org admin syncs the twelve signing secrets and checks the Default runner group (docs/releasing.md), then the first release run on every platform.
2. Hardware ray tracing in Rendering mode (M5) waits on an owner decision: wgpu exposes ray queries only as an experimental feature behind an unsafe opt-in, and the workspace forbids unsafe (craftrules allows it only in an isolated, tested helper crate).
3. Pen tilt (M2) once the windowing layer reports it; Alembic files in the HDF5 container and Alembic animation.