Canvas View and navigation

Canvas View is the whole panel, including its tool settings and footer. The canvas is the image area inside it: use it to paint, inspect details and check seams or individual channels. Changing the view does not resize the document.

The two rows above the canvas contain document and tool settings. In a narrow panel, slider tracks hide while their number fields remain available. You can type a value or drag a numeric field’s label; controls wrap to another line if needed.

The Canvas View footer holds controls for quality, live texture updates, post-processing, UV overlays, guides and channel viewing. It also contains HDR, the color-input mode, and hints for the active tool.

Layer Preview

Drag the Layer Preview strip at the bottom of Layer Settings upward to inspect the selected layer; drag it down to hide the image. The separate Properties window has the same Layer Preview and opens with it visible. The block stays below the scrolling settings and is at most 256 px high, including the strip, or less if space is limited. Its chosen height stays unchanged when switching layers or image resolutions. Small images enlarge proportionally to fit; large images shrink without cropping.

The Layer Preview shows the layer before blending with other layers. A group shows its own colored content against transparency.

The compact, neutral R / G / B / A buttons toggle channels independently, like the Canvas View footer. One RGB channel is displayed in grayscale; A controls transparency. Enable only A to inspect alpha in grayscale, or turn all four off to show black. Transparent areas use a checkerboard. This selection belongs to the Layer Preview only: it does not change the Canvas View, painting, the layer or saved output.

In Canvas View or Layer Preview, hold the left mouse button and drag across R / G / B / A to switch several channels together.

Context tools

Tools below the toolbar separator appear when they are relevant. Selecting a Gradient layer automatically selects Gradient Handles (the hand icon). You can switch back to a basic tool; it stays selected until you activate another layer. With multiple layers selected, context tools use the active, last-selected layer.

Enabling UV adds UV Island Select without switching tools. Edit on Canvas on an FX parameter adds one temporary hand tool at the bottom. Its tooltip and the Canvas View footer identify the parameter; editing another parameter replaces this tool.

Click the active context-tool button or press Escape to return to your last basic tool. Leaving a temporary FX tool returns to the tool used before it, including an available context tool. During a drag, Escape cancels only that drag; press it again to leave the tool. Changing inspector values, opening a color picker or switching applications does not leave the tool.

Mesh UV overlay

Enable UV in the footer and assign a Mesh to see its UV island outlines over the image. The UV panel lets you choose the channel, submesh, line color and opacity. The outlines follow zoom, pan and view rotation and never appear in exports. To paint a specific part of the model, use UV Island selection.

The Mesh field also accepts a model or GameObject containing a mesh; if it contains several meshes, WhimTex uses the first one it finds.

Painting a Rubik's cube texture in WhimTex with its UV outlines visible and the textured cube beside it in Unity Scene view

Use the UV outlines to place details on the right faces. With Live Update enabled, you can see brush edits on the model in Scene view as you paint.

Image filtering

Canvas → Filter controls image sampling in WhimTex: Point keeps pixels crisp, Bilinear smooths pixel transitions, and Trilinear blends mip levels when available. It does not generate mipmaps. Pencil temporarily uses Point and full preview quality.

For the saved TIFF in a material or sprite, set Filter Mode and mipmaps in its Unity Inspector. PNG/JPEG/EXR files do not store a sampling mode for other applications.

Move around

  • Hold the mouse wheel and drag to pan.
  • Hold Shift and drag with the mouse wheel pressed to rotate the view with any tool. Rotation lightly snaps to 90° steps and to angles that make a guide horizontal or vertical on screen. The closest angle wins; hold Ctrl to bypass snapping. Hidden guides and guides with Snap to Guides turned off do not add magnetic angles.
  • Scroll to zoom around the pointer with any tool.
  • With Zoom (Z), click to zoom in, Alt-click to zoom out, or drag a rectangle around the area you want to inspect.
  • Fit shows the whole canvas upright; 100% is useful for checking pixel detail.
  • Enter a precise percentage in Zoom %, then press Enter or leave the field. The center of the view and its rotation stay in place.
  • Enter an exact angle in Zoom → Angle ° and press Enter (or leave the field) to apply it without snapping. 0° resets rotation without changing zoom or pan.

View rotation does not rotate the layers or affect saving and export.

Tiled is a toggle button in the Canvas View footer, beside UV and Guides. Enable it to see repeated copies and work across the edges: painting, erasing, filling and selections wrap to the opposite side. The saved image size and layer transforms remain unchanged. See seamless painting.

Guides

Create and edit guides

Drag from the thin strip on the left of Canvas View to create a vertical guide, or from the top strip for a horizontal one. The new line is parallel to the strip even on a rotated canvas; afterwards it moves, zooms and rotates with the canvas.

Drag an existing line to reposition it. Drop it back on either strip or outside Canvas View to remove it; Esc cancels the drag. You can create guides from the edge strips with any tool. Existing guides have the lowest input priority: they can be dragged only where the active tool does not use the click. Transform handles and the inside of its frame take priority, including for multiple layers and temporary FX transforms; Point and Normal handles also take priority. To move a guide, use Transform outside its frame or an FX Edit on Canvas tool away from its handles. Painting, filling and area-selection tools ignore existing guides; the lines stay visible and draw below all tool handles. Click a guide to select it: arrow keys nudge it, Shift increases the step tenfold, and Delete removes it. Click elsewhere or press Esc to deselect. Double-click a guide to enter an exact Position (px) and Angle (°). Angles are relative to the canvas: 0° is horizontal, 90° is vertical. For those two orientations, Position is the distance from the top or left edge; at other angles it is the signed perpendicular distance from the top-left corner.

Right-click a guide to Edit, Duplicate or Delete it. Right-click either edge strip for the shared controls:

  • Show Guides — hide or show the lines. The Guides button next to UV in the Canvas View footer does the same. Hidden guides do not attract tools; creating a new guide shows them again.
  • Lock Guides — protect existing lines from editing. You can still create new guides and snap tools to locked ones.
  • Snap to Guides — toggle snapping; hold Ctrl to bypass it temporarily.
  • Undo Guide Change / Redo Guide Change — undo or redo guide edits without affecting painting.
  • Clear Guides — remove all guides.

Snap tools to guides

Moving or resizing a layer (including a Shader FX Transform 2D area) snaps its edges to parallel guides. Moving also snaps its center lines. Edges ignore oblique guides; rotating a transform can align it parallel or perpendicular to a guide. Shift retains its usual rotation and resize constraints.

Nearby guide intersections take priority over individual lines, with the same snap radius regardless of zoom. They attract the brush/pencil center, selection and shape points, the pivot, and a transform’s center, corners and edge midpoints. When movement is constrained, only intersections on the allowed path attract the point. Holding Ctrl bypasses snapping.

The pivot and polygonal lasso vertices can also snap to a single guide at any angle. Rectangle selection snaps to individual lines only when they are parallel to the canvas axes; intersections work at any angle.

Paint along a guide

Brush and Pencil also snap their stroke center to guides at any angle and to intersections, including while erasing. The cursor shows the snapped position. If you start a stroke snapped to a guide, holding Shift keeps it on that same line no matter how far the pointer moves away. Release Shift for ordinary nearby snapping; press it again during the same stroke to return to the original guide. At an intersection, the guide closest to the starting pointer is used. If you start away from guides, Shift keeps its usual horizontal or vertical screen direction. Hold Ctrl to bypass guide snapping and locking. Pencil strokes still follow the pixel grid; brush Scatter is applied after snapping the stroke path.

Position a guide with snapping

Dragging a guide snaps it to parallel canvas edges, the canvas center, and the selected layer’s parallel edges and center lines, but not to other guides. It can also snap to guide intersections, unless a guide parallel to the dragged one passes through that intersection. Hold Ctrl for free placement.

Guides are not exported and are cleared when switching documents.

Appearance and snap distance

Guides that are horizontal or vertical in the current Canvas View appear bright cyan; angled guides use a softer blue-gray. The colors update as you rotate the view, without changing snapping.

In User Settings → Guides & Snapping, choose colors for Aligned Guides, Angled Guides and the Active Guide (hovered, selected or dragged). A guide about to be deleted stays red. Snap Radius (px) sets the attraction distance for guides, intersections, canvas edges and pivot anchors: 1–64 UI pixels, default 8, independent of zoom. Angular snapping is unchanged. These preferences apply across windows and are saved between sessions; Reset Guides & Snapping restores their defaults.

Balance detail and responsiveness

Live Quality defaults to 100%. Your manually chosen value is remembered. Lower it in the footer if painting on a large image feels slow. Save and export still use full resolution.

Ordinary non-painting preview is limited to 512 pixels. Live Quality 100% does not remove that limit. Select Pencil without painting for full-resolution preview, and enable Tiled when checking seams. Patch Quilting can select different patches at reduced resolution; verify this full-resolution view before export.

See your paint on a model

  1. Save the document and assign its texture to your model’s material.
  2. Turn on Live Update (the circle button) in the Canvas View footer, next to Post FX.
  3. Paint or adjust layers: objects using that texture update in Scene View.

Live Update in WhimTex: white lettering painted across the cube's texture appears on the model in Unity Scene view

The white lettering crosses two faces in the texture; Live Update lets you check how it wraps around the cube while painting.

The material keeps its texture reference when you toggle Live Update or close WhimTex. Turning it off or closing without saving restores the last saved image. Press Save or Ctrl+S to keep your edits; Save As creates a different asset and does not redirect existing materials.

Live Update shows the composition without EV, channel-display masks, Debug or preview Post FX. While editing it uses preview quality, then refines the result when you stop. If you resize the canvas, the live image fits the saved texture size until you save again. Live Update starts off when you open the window and turns off when you switch documents or reload scripts.

Use a compositor inside another document

Assign the saved document’s output texture to a File layer in another document. Saving the source refreshes the receiving window automatically. To see changes while editing, enable Live Update in the source window. The receiving window does not need Live Update enabled just to display them. Turning Live Update off restores the saved image in the receiving window too.

Only one TIFF document can publish Live Update at a time. A receiving window can display the source’s live changes, but save each intermediate document to pass a chain of results onwards. Save As creates a new asset; existing File layers keep referencing the original. Automatic refresh across cyclic links, such as A using B while B uses A, is disabled to prevent feedback loops.

Check brightness and channels

EV changes the viewing exposure, not the image itself. Keep it at 0 for the normal view. If white looks gray or colors look overexposed, check this field first.

R / G / B / A lets you inspect the color channels or transparency separately. See color and channels for the display modes.

Channel buttons also affect new paint: disabled color channels receive zero, and turning off A prevents Brush, Pencil and Fill from leaving a mark. Turn all four channels on for ordinary painting.

Background and problem pixels

Change the transparency checkerboard’s colors and size in Window tab ⋮ → User Settings….

The bug button highlights pixels with invalid color values. Use it to investigate a broken-looking effect; its highlight color is also in User Settings. The overlay is not included in saved images.

Zoom, EV and Post FX change only the view. Tiled also affects painting by wrapping strokes across canvas edges.