Deep Paint 2.0 is free

Just stumbled on this while looking for free Photoshop plugins... Maybe someone can make use of it...

Description:

"Deep Paint offers a realistic painting experience for digital artists and graphics professionals. Deep Paint intergrates stroke-by-stroke artistic photo-cloning, fully editable brush and canvas settings, and paint functionality for realistic and stunning paint effects. Experience thickly textured oils, bold acrylics, and dramatic watercolors. Deep paint simplifies your artistic workflow as a Photoshop plug-in or standalone application, with special support for the Wacom Intuos or compatible pressure sensitive pad."


http://www.download.com/Deep-Paint/3000-2191_4-10398243.html?tag=lst-2-7

Aww, I have the trial version of Deep Paint 3D (to paint sculpted prim textures). Too bad this older version isn't about painting on 3D meshes.

As for Deep Paint 3D, the trial version points to the website to purchase Deep Paint 3D, but there's no mention of Deep Paint 3D at their online store. So, I emailed the sales address, and got no response. Searching the web, I've found a wide variation in listed prices for the product... from $49 - $995.

Anyone using a UV painter program? The main benefit is the ability to project other images onto the UV mesh, such as labels, numbers, and text. That stuff is nearly impossible to hand-paint or photoshop uniformly onto a UV map. Hmm, since Blender can paint directly onto a UV mesh, I wonder if a python script could someone project an image same as Deep Paint 3D...

Thanks Nimue, i'll check it out and have a play with it sometime

P.S any good plugins for photoshop lol would like to know what you come across and have you tried adobes website??

Not to disparage the original post, but readers should be aware that Deep Paint 2.0 is ONLY a paint program. It does some nice cloning patterns and the usual photoshop/psp/gimp things.
But it is NOT the same as the commercial product called "Deep Paint 3D/Deep UV"
http://www.righthemisphere.com/products/dp3d/Deep3D_UV/index.html
...unfortunately.
IMO your 60Mb of download is better spent on The Gimp.
...Still, it is a good, simple tool.

Right, Deep Paint and Deep Paint 3D are totally different things. For what it's worth, I kind of like Deep Paint, and I really hate Deep Paint 3D. For a free application, Deep Paint is surprisingly good at what it does, mimicking dry and wet drawing and painting media as well as lots of different canvas types. Deep Paint 3D, on the other hand, is just the opposite; for an expensive "commercial" application, it's surprisingly bad at what it does. Its tool palette is very limited, it often behaves quite bizarrely if it doesn't like your UV layout (the avatar mannequin is a prime example), and it's very prone to random crashes. I was extremely disappointed with it after having fallen for the hype it had been receiving a couple years back.

Anyway, I'm not sure why you're implying that Deep Paint and GIMP somehow are in competition. You did a good thing by taking the time to explain the difference between DP and DP3D, but with that ending line, you might well confuse people all over again.

Chosen - for what you say Deep Paint 3D is bad at, what application would you reccommend instead? I know there were a couple of app names thrown about the forums but I can't recall what they are and which, if any, are meant to be any use - so I dunno what to search for

I'd like to have a play around with something that will let me view and alter textures directly on the avatar mannequin. I remember having the impression that nothing's *particularly* good at that, but I'd like to try working that way side by side with PS for a bit - see what happens.

(sorry to hijack the thread! First relevant one I found!)

Sorry to have to say this Erin, but I'm not a fan of 3D painters in general. I've tried out every one I could get my hands on, and they've all got issues. Deep Paint 3D was probably the most disappointing of the lot since it was so hyped when it came out, and because it's so unstable.

I still have yet to try Z-Brush 3, but from what I saw of it in pre-release, it looked promising (at least on video). I just haven't had time to play with it since it came out. It does a hell of a lot more than just painting, of course, but its painting tools look very strong. Sorry I don't have a more educated answer on it (yet).

Chip raves about Ghostpainter. I'm sure it's great, but be aware that it's not a stand alone program. It acts as a bridge between Photoshop and 3DS Max. So if you want to use it, you'll need to have all three programs, and know how to use them.

Maya's built-in painting tools are good news/bad news. The good is that they're very stable, and they respond much more predictably than those in most other programs. The bad is that they're just not very powerful. For 2D painting on a surface, Maya only gives you a handful of rudimentary brushes, nothing anywhere near as powerful as the tools you're used to from Photoshop or PSP.

Photoshop CS3 Extended has real promise. It doesn't let you paint directly on the model, but it does let you use all of Photoshop's tools to paint on your texture, and then see the results in one click. Except for the fact that it's a bit quirky in its current handling of things like camera control, I've got no real complaints about it so far. It works very well. Like just about everything Adobe, it's pricey, but it's worth every penny.

So, if you want a recommendation, PS CS3E is it. It's probably not exactly what you were asking for, since it's not true 3D painting, but for the amount of 2D power Photoshop affords, I can live with painting on a canvas and seeing the results on the model.

Interesting commentary Chosen, thanks for the update.
I haven't done any 3d for quite some time, so was interested setting up a skin painting workflow recently... a free one.
Keeping in mind that being able to use decent paint tools *and* 3d preview really means a few button presses and intermediate stages.. or quite a lot of cash for an integrated solution:
My free solution so far is:
Blender - load the standard mesh file - do some minor setup - save as a template - each new skin uses this template
Gimp - load the standard skin file - save as template - each new skin uses this template
macros - make a simple keyboard macro using AutoHotkey/AutoIT or similar to do the multiple button pressing and any text entry so as to make a single key combination: 1)save the master file from gimp, to an intermediate file, 2)tab to gimp, 3)move the mouse to the right panel, and 4)hit ctrl-r to reload the image in the UVW editor.
(or i prefer it to just save the file with the right name.ext - i manually tab and reload)

Most of the work is done in Gimp, and blender is used just to confirm the look, and locate specific areas, but if you need to do some simple colour painting, or more usually , some smudging in blender, then just export the bmp and pull it into Gimp as a new layer... slash out the bits you need and continue in Gimp.
I can probably supply my templates and a quick workflow if anyone is *really* interested... but it's not too hard to figure out yourself if you know any 3d at all.

It's not the best, but it works, is quick, relatively simple, and is totally free.

It IS about time someone made a decent, cheap, all in one 3d painter though... i'm surprised there isn't yet to be honest. I suspect Z-Paint and similar more specific/expensive apps would supply the power-paint-tools, and paste-2d-onto-3d department a lot better.

I used to have a lot of problem with Deep Paint 3D crashing as well. Since I've learned it better and using it 'as intended', it hasn't crashed in a long time. I'm a lot more mindful of the meshes and UVs, and of the order in which I do things. When I start fumbling with it like I'm on a bug-hunt, it does crash more often. In my experience with DP3D, being mindful seriously helps.

Now that I know how to use DP3D without it crashing, I can now focus on exploring the painting tools and using them to get what I want.

But there are two things that I really don't like about DP3D. I don't like how the strokes build-up. It's way too easy to get heavy-handed. Or maybe I'm missing a setting a somewhere to tone down the build-up. And, in Projection Paint, there is some horrible artifacting when using uber contrasting colours.

Oh, wait, another thing I don't like about DP3D. I don't like how it handles layers and blending modes when in projection paint. This can be particularly tricky when trying to smudge.

For the most part, I use DP3D to build several different layers. Then I'll composite them and clean up in Photoshop. Bulk of the colour on one layer, gross lighting on another, and then a few messy masks on a few more layers. I've also been known to toss in some baked procedurals from another 3d package (RM, 3DS Max, whatever).

* If you want to get uber serious about baking procedurals, you really should look into RenderMan complient renderers and RM's Shading Language.

No matter what 3d softwares I use, I always end up on Photoshop for comping. Let 3d softs do the 3d work in bits-n-pieces, then put it all together in PS.

Other 3D paint apps not mentioned include Meshpaint 3D and Bodypaint. I've never used either so I have no idea if they're any good (in fact, it's been so long since I heard about Meshpaint that I don't know if it still even exists,) just throwing out names. Oh and SL-specific tools like avpainter.

Meshpaint was released around 1997 and has long since bitten the dust, along with Detailer which was around at the same time. There's a Meshpaint around now but it's not the same product. It's a hair and mesh cloning/scattering plugin for Lightwave. I've heard pretty good things about Bodypaint. Since I'm not sure DeepPaint3D is still being developed it might be the best choice these days for a stand-alone 3D paint app. I've never used it though so take that with a big grain of salt. Maxon offers a demo if you want to take it for a spin.

Bodypaint is quite stable and is fairly easy to understand how to use, since it uses many of the conventions that are similar to Photoshop. It also works with the native .PSD format. Its not perfect, but I think its the most viable solution if you're willing to spend.

For those who aren't comfortable with the quirky interface of Z-Brush, something to look out for is the upcoming version of Mudbox which will have 3d painting features (it currently only has 3d sculpting). Mudbox was developed by the people who used to work at weta doing modeling for LOTR.
http://www.mudbox3d.com/

Modo also has a toolset for 3d painting, but I find Modo crashes occasionally. It does look promising, as the product matures.

I've never used Amazon 3D Paint tho.
http://www.ifx.com/amazon/

Thanks for the link Nimue!

I like expanding my options. I am currently learning the methods of painting directly on the
mesh in blender, but as I think was mentioned above the paint tools are pretty weak so it
makes it a bit moot. It does work well for previewing though.

Hax I think I would be interested in looking at your blender-gimp workflow just to speed the
curve.

If you are already using Gimp/Blender to skin, then you will already know most, if not all, of the process. The macro simply makes the Gimp export/Blender refresh happen more effortlessly.

COMPONENTS:
1) Skin_TEMPLATE.blend - with the mesh separated/grouped into the relevant parts corresponding to the various skins (head, torso, legs, skirt). [ A Simple import and minor setup of http://static.secondlife.com/downloads/avatar/avatar_mesh.zip ]

2) Head_TEMPLATE.xcf - simple xcf version of the layered psd files
http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/AVUVTemplates.html

3) keyboard macro - when i push ctrl-alt-S in Gimp, which i have set to do a "save copy", the macro allows this to happen, and then adds a few wait periods, enter pressess, as well as making sure the file extension is .bmp by tabbing to the field and replacing the last 4 characters of the existing name with .bmp.. and some more enter presses - very simple - I highly recommend AutoHotKey (AHK) [ http://www.autohotkey.com/download/AutoHotkeyInstall.exe - Windows ONLY ]


PROCESS:
1)Copy Skin_TEMPLATE.blend and Head_TEMPLATE.xcf (or whatever file corresponds to the skin you are making) to the appropriate names...
eg:
BETLOG_Hax_HEAD.blend
BETLOG_Hax_HEAD.xcf

2)Open them both

3)Hit ctrl-alt-S in Gimp to export the image as .bmp (macro kicks in to do all the tedious multiple button presses)

4)tab to Blender (or the macro has already done it if you write it that way), and load the .bmp into its UVW/Image viewer, applied to the object/UVW selection in question.

5)Tab to Gimp - work - on basic pasting from pics, and positioning etc.

6)ctrl-alt-S (macro export to bmp)

7) Tab to Blender, mouse over UVW viewer part of window, ALT-R to reload the .bmp image.

check it out in blender... generally avoid using blender to paint, and *if* changes are made in blender (usually just to locate an elusive point, or slap some matching colour on two sides of an annoying seam.) then export the image, overwriting the .bmp

9)Tab to Gimp, *if any changes were made*; import the .bmp as a new layer, hack out the bit you want, discard the rest. Otherwise continue pushing pixels, until you are ready to view it in 3d again....
* remember, you are working on the .xcf file, and exporting/"save a copy" to the intermediate .bmp - make sure it stays that way or you may accidentally loose all your layer info in the master file*

10) Loop to 6) **** ad infinitum as necessary.

11) Export to tga if alpha is needed, as .bmp otherwise (for thumbnail previews in explorer)

12) Load into SL.

13) Swear, return to Gimp/Blender to fix stupid oversight, pay another L$10 and then upload again. Hopefully only once.

...but i'm sure most of you already knew all that.
***********************************
Newbies should note that its by having the templates already set up, and ready to start work with, as well as the macro easing the repetition of the export/refresh that is what makes this so much less tedious than it can be after the 500th preview. It's as simple as that.
**********************************

This is the macro is use... simple, brutal... works.. took 2 minutes to write and confirm as working.
;----------------------------------------------------------------
#IfWinActive ahk_class gdkWindowToplevel ;GIMP SAVE A COPY
~^!s::
KeyWait, s,
Sleep, 200
SendInput, {end}{backspace 3}
SendRaw, bmp
loop, 3
{
Sleep, 300
SendInput {enter}
}
return
;----------------------------------------------------------------