Overview
With Spline Mask you can turn Unity Splines into editable, paintable masks projected onto any mesh. Drop in a SplineContainer and a Renderer and Spline Mask projects each spline through the mesh's UV0 to generate a live gradient texture you can preview, style, animate, bind to a material slot in the Scene View, and export as texture.
Real time updates while you edit spline knots. Everything runs on the GPU, so updates stay smooth.
Upgrade Path
Everyone who owns any of these assets will get this asset at a discount:
The Idea
The core idea came from the magic tattoos of the animals of Malbers Animations. Having the emissive textures revealed in an animated way makes the magic transformation feel alive.
With Spline Mask you can create a texture with gradients that can be used to drive the revealing animation of magic lines with e. g. a shader. In addition you can also create your own magic lines from the splines.
How It Works
Spline Mask opens as a dedicated editor window with a three-panel layout: settings on the left, a live preview in the center and a tabbed Brush / Preview / File panel on the right. The pipeline samples each spline, projects the samples onto the renderer's UV0 with compute shaders, and stamps a gradient along the resulting path.
Who This Is For
This asset is for professional Unity developers who know about masking, materials, shaders and among other things what UVs are and who know what they can achieve with an asset like this when it's available directly inside the Unity Editor.
Editor & Live Preview
- Three-panel editor window with pannable, zoomable, fit-to-view live preview
- GPU-driven projection updates in real time as you edit splines, gradients, or brush sliders
- Square output texture from 256 up to 8192
- Optional reference texture as a preview-only backdrop. Great for placing tattoos against the diffuse map without burning the reference into the export
- In-scene line renderer approximation for visualisation of the spline gradients
Gradient & Mask Control
- Custom gradients plus built-in black to white and solid white presets for grayscale and fixed color masks
- Per spline mode gradient distribution: every spline runs the full gradient from 0 to 1
- Global mode gradient distribution: the gradient is split evenly across the splines
- Background mode picks between transparent and opaque black backdrops, applied identically to preview and export
Deep Brush Styling
Sliders adjust the projected texture in real time. Save and load brush styling independently as brush preset assets to build a personal library of looks. Available categories:
- Shape - body opacity, cap roundness, softness, taper
- Dynamics - width variation, path jitter, hue jitter, opacity jitter, stamp spacing
- Edges - edge noise, watercolour wet edges, hollow / outline mode
- Calligraphy - directional thick-thin nib effect with adjustable angle
- Glow - outer halo with controllable radius and intensity
- Feather - tapered hair-like barbs along the rim with density, length and angle controls
- Multi-Pass - parallel bristle sub-strokes and overlapping echo passes for sketchy and bristled looks
- Decorative Marks - procedural runes, sigils and magic seals stamped along the stroke - each deterministic from spline position so they stay stable across rebuilds
- Texture - optional grayscale stroke texture with amount and tiling.
Animation
- Reveal-sweep animation in Forward, Backward and Ping-Pong modes with adjustable speed
Symmetry
- Mirror duplicates each spline across an X / Y / Z plane in the renderer's local space - model one side of a tattoo and get the other side automatically. Useful for characters and animals
Integration
- Optional one-click integration with Spline Tools in order to get renderer and spline container from the Mesh Paint handler's current target
Output and Presets
- Export to PNG or EXR
- MaskPreset and BrushPreset ScriptableObjects for saving. Note: Of course there's a scene dependency of mesh and spline container
Use Cases
Any workflow where a hand-drawn spline needs to land in a UV-correct texture, examples:
- Animated tattoos, runes and magic circles on characters
- Animal stripes, scales, fur patterns and species-specific markings
- Dirt, grime, blood and damage masks for weathering passes
- Path overlays, racing-line guides, tactical map stamps and territory markers
- Decals, scratches, weld seams and panel lines on hard-surface meshes
- VFX-driven reveals - spreading magic, growing vines, charging glyphs
