Gradient Tools

Gradient Tools is a Blender add-on for building color palettes and gradients on a simple 2D grid, then painting them directly onto meshes, curve objects and vertex-color layers — interactively, in real time, and without ever leaving the viewport.

Pick a color (or a gradient), choose a tool, paint, and watch your model update live. Whether you are hand-painting a stylized character, color-blocking a hard-surface prop, preparing exact client colors for VFX, or baking a texture-free asset for a game engine, you get a fast, fully visual, non-destructive pipeline from palette to finished surface.

No UV unwrapping required

Every painting tool generates the UVs it needs on the fly (and creates a UV map if your mesh has none). You never have to unwrap by hand.

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Key concepts

Four ideas are enough to understand the whole add-on:

• Palette — a named grid of colors. It generates a real Blender image texture and a ready-to-use material for you.
• Strip — one cell of the grid. A strip is either a Flat color or a Gradient (a genuine Blender Color Ramp).
• Target strip — the strip you are currently painting with. You pick it in the UV Tools panel before painting.
• Tools — four ways to map your faces' UVs onto the target strip: Project, Paint, Radial and Path. Each shows a live preview before you commit.

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Explore the docs

• Getting started

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  Install the add-on and paint your first gradient in under a minute.

  Quick start

• Palettes & strips

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  Build palettes, edit flat & gradient strips, manage the grid, load presets.

  Palettes overview

• Painting tools

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  Project, Paint (drag/freehand), Radial and Path — with live previews.

  Painting overview

• Outputs

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  UV textures, vertex colors, curve gradients and six per-object material looks.

  Materials & UV textures

• Image / UV Editor

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  Eyedropper from any image, grid overlay, select & retarget faces.

  Image / UV Editor

• Reference

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  Every panel, preference and shortcut, plus supported file formats.

  Reference

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At a glance

Blender version	4.2 LTS and newer (including 5.x)
Render engines	Cycles and EEVEE
Object types	Mesh and Curve
Outputs	UV texture, vertex colors, or curve gradient — plus PNG export
Texture resolution	32×32 up to 4096×4096, Non-Color or sRGB
Dependencies	None — Blender's Python API, native shader nodes and NumPy only
License	GPL-3.0-or-later

Where to find it in Blender

Open the sidebar with N in the 3D Viewport (or the Image / UV Editor) and select the Gradient Tools tab. See The interface.