Hi guys,
I’m very new to digital art and am trying to pick it up myself. Hoping someone can give me a few tips!
I work for an anatomy lab and we are looking at producing anatomical teaching models by CT scanning specimens, creating a digital 3D surface mesh from the scan, colouring it and then using a colour 3D printer to print out a replica. I’ve got all of the steps but one sorted - the digital colouring.
I’ve been looking for a program that allows me to directly “paint” colour onto the mesh. I’ve trialled a few such as BodyPaint 3D (which gave pixeled results), Meshlab (which let me paint ok but the files wouldn’t export correctly) and Mari - which so far is my favourite to paint with however i’m struggling to export any files that I can use…
When I import my .obj file model into Mari, it only lets me paint onto it in the PTex format (as I said before I’m new to all of this but I think UV is usually the way it’s done?). Anyway, the only way that Mari lets me export the painted texture that i’ve created is as a .ptx file - which I cannot use in any other software package… Is there a way to convert the PTex texture to a UV one that can be exported as a tiff or bmp? (If yes can you please give me a rough outline on how to set me on my way?) Or is there another program that will let me read the PTex file and convert it to something I can use?
Ultimately I am hoping to produce an .obj file with a painted texture map, which I can import into a program such as Rhino and export as a VRML (.wrl) file that the printer can read.
I was expecting that painting onto a 3D surface would be relatively easy but i’m really struggling to get anything working.
Thanks!