Quality 3d paint program.

[EricChadwick]

I've tried demos of a few, haven't committed yet. I use 3ds max & Photoshop, so a good connection with them is important for me.

Deep Paint 3D has projection paint, good connectivity to Photoshop and 3ds max. Some UI problems and some awkward paint tool issues.

ZBrush also has projection paint, but some find the UI annoying. Great painting tools. Not a smooth connection with 3ds max. Can't recall how it connects with PS.

Body Paint 3D had the best UI of all, very configurable. No projection paint though. Very comparable with DP3D in the tools dept, except I've heard its a bit more stable.

Ghostpaint 2 seems really nice. Basically Photoshop running inside 3ds max. No projection paint though, and the brush strokes weren't real-time in 3D (spline preview in 3D, not pixel preview).

Projection paint is basically a very helpful tool for painting across UV seams. Would be especially helpful for pattern-painting, like fur or scales or fabric. Also for painting with difficult UVs, like auto-unwrapped massively-segmented ones.

Anyhow, my thoughts. Not doing much painting right now, so I don't need to choose just yet.

[thomaspecht]

Originally posted by posm
ZBrush also has projection paint, but some find the UI annoying. Great painting tools. Not a smooth connection with 3ds max. Can't recall how it connects with PS.


afaik, zbrush at the moment does not have any plugin-connections but at least you can export psd to photoshop and import obj-geometry.

here's more on the whole 3d paint subject: http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=61068&perpage=15&pagenumber=4

if you are planning to purchase the upcoming zbrush, i'd wait for it since there seem to be some significant improvements. the other option is deep paint, which might lose some ground to zbrush in the future according to the zbrush specs.

[dmthurman]

Zbrush all the way, i'd not wait for the upgrade, since most of the changes, from what I understand are more to do with the modeling end. You'll want to read a bit about uv tile projection the way Zbrush handles them. Wonderfully good, but you can't paint over it in photoshop, although it also can create maps that can be repainted in Photoshop, the UV tile setup rocks....

[EricChadwick]

I was wrong about Body Paint 3D not having projection paint! Well, at least until today, when they annouced v2.

http://www.bodypaint3d.com/

This makes me want to spend some serious time with the demo.

[dans]

Well GhostPainter 2 is somewhat different from the others since it doesn't solely contains 3D-Paint stuff. It deals a lot with the whole Photoshop <-> 3ds max integration. Nice is to unwrap UVs into Photoshop paths which gives you precise thin lines even in zoomed views. Of course projection paint mode would be nice but this a limitation of the Photoshop integration. A big plus is that you work directly in the 3ds max viewport and have not to deal with any import/export issues and you can also use it for some other stuff inside 3ds max (e.g. painting particle emission...) since you are not bound to a special set of texture slots. You can also go through an animation or move parts of the character to paint in difficult areas.

And for editing 3ds max rendered stills the psd-manager component is unbeatable (renders multilayered PSD files + selections etc.). Hoping to get 16 bit support in Photoshop 8 for even more tweaking abilities :)

So which 3D application(s) do you wan to use ?

Daniel

[EricChadwick]

About the UV-splines, here's a recent freebie Maxscript for this, in case anyone missed it...

PSDPathUnwrapper
http://www.rpmanager.com/freeTools.htm

[MasonDoran]

Maya has 3d paint natively.....and a script that allows realtime transfer with layers and all that into Photoshop.

With the potential of Zbrush in its next release(displacement and normal mapping)....i recommend it over Deep Paint. Btw....i found Deep Paint to unstable for whatever reason.

Zbrush currently does not allow painting on bump or spec maps.....which can be a problem if u dont want to use photoshop for that.

Deep Paint Does paint on all maps......

[dAfTiE]

I'd take a look at the BP2 demo if you haven't already...
It's got projection paint,some really nice UV unwrapping tools,
it can paint on a bunch of channels at the same time,and it's got RAYBRUSH! :)
Raybrush lets you paint on the raytraced 3d model,so you can paint down the specular map while seeing it raytraced,
it's just way too cool for words :applause:
Not tried it with any other apps then C4D,but from what I hear from others the connections are really solid,
as is the app itself...been using C4D for a while now,and never had it crash (without doing something REALLY stupid :) ),
and the OGL stuff and that is all the same.

[sarajane]

I haven't used some of the other programs, but I did recently purchase Deep Paint in a bundle with Deep UV. What a lifesaver. I absolutely love this program. My favorite thing is the constant update in the 3d program. Oh! And it will work interactively with Photoshop. You can switch the texture back and forth between the two and your 3D program!

I'm really happy to have bought it...whichever program you choose, make sure to get one. You won't be able to imagine life without it.

[thomaspecht]

i recently tried bodypaint3D version 2 and didn't find it too spectacular. again, this is painting with tools that lack compared to photoshop and the like. maybe a new user would prefer it over deep paint since the ui is customizeable, performance seems a little better and the price is lower, too. for someone whol alread knows deep paint, it's probably not worth a switch.

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