Vertex colors

Sometimes you don't want a texture at all — you want the color baked into the mesh as per-vertex data. Gradient Tools can convert any painted palette into vertex colors in one click.

This is a texture-free, game-ready pipeline: no image to manage, tiny memory footprint, and it imports cleanly into engines that read vertex colors.

Bake to Vertex Colors

1. Paint your faces as usual with any tool (Project, Paint, Radial, Path).
2. In the Apply & Export panel, click Bake to Vertex Colors.

Gradient Tools samples the palette at each face and writes the result into a color attribute on the mesh. You can optionally get a matching material that displays those vertex colors, so the look is identical to the textured version.

Prove it's per-vertex

After baking, hide the image texture (or switch to viewing the color attribute) and orbit the model — the colors are now part of the geometry, no UVs or texture required.

When to use it

• Game assets that use vertex colors for tinting, team colors, masks or AO-style shading.
• Lightweight props where a texture would be overkill.
• Stylized models where flat, faceted color is the look you want.

Gradients become per-vertex

If you bake a face that uses a gradient strip, each vertex records its own sampled color, so the gradient survives as a smooth per-vertex blend (subject to your mesh density — denser meshes capture smoother gradients).

Texture vs. vertex colors

The UV-texture path gives pixel-perfect gradients regardless of mesh density; vertex colors give a texture-free result whose smoothness depends on topology. Pick whichever fits your target. You can always bake from the same painted palette.