Glaze Painter

How the glaze painter works

The pot is a lathe-generated solid of revolution. Its surface is unwrapped into a rectangular texture, and every stroke you make is drawn onto a 2D canvas that is mapped back onto the mesh as a CanvasTexture. Painting on a curved 3D object and painting on a flat texture are the same operation, viewed two different ways.

The four tools behave differently

• Brush lays down a soft-edged stroke with visible bristle texture. Glaze builds up in overlapping passes, exactly as it does with a real glaze brush.
• Sponge deposits a broken, porous pattern with holes in it — useful for speckled and stippled surfaces.
• Dip floods the entire surface at once at a single, even thickness, which is what a clean dip gives you.
• Wax paints a semi-transparent grey layer that resists glaze. On a real pot this would be wiped clean before firing; here it is shown so you can plan a resist pattern.

Reading the coverage numbers

Coverage is the proportion of texture pixels that carry glaze. Glaze mass is estimated from coverage, the surface area of the form and a nominal applied thickness of 0.35 mm at a dry glaze density of roughly 1.4 g/cm³. That is close to the thickness a single dip produces on a mid-fire stoneware.

Try these experiments

1. Use Dip, then check the coverage figure. It is the baseline for a single dip.
2. Switch to Brush, paint half the pot, then Dip again. Compare the coverage and the mass — the brush layer adds thickness on top of the dip.
3. Paint a pattern with Wax, then Dip. The waxed areas stay unglazed, which is how a resist decoration is built.
4. Export a PNG and compare it with a test tile from your own glaze bucket.