3D drawing programs?

hi all,

have been off for a bit, but back to hammering away at getting a skin done. someday. maybe.

i believe it was chip who mentioned some time ago there are programs that permit drawing directly on the 3D model. is this true, or did i make it up? or was it some strange visitation in a dream...?

at any rate, if this is accurate, what programs have this kind of functionality?

i'm working in GIMP and having some luck, but the seams are getting on my last nerve.

thanks all. happy new year.
anik

It's true The two most widely used are Maxon's Bodypaint and Right Hemisphere's Deep Paint 3D. There's also the freeware program Tattoo but it's very simple and not good for much and the link seems to be dead now. The one I use is called Ghostpainter2 which acts as a bridge between PhotoShop and 3ds Max.

if no one has mentioned it lately, you're worth your weight in gold.
non-virtually speaking.

cheers,
anik

Chip, I just watched the Ghostpainter video. Wow. That's got to be the coolest thing I've ever seen. I've been wishing something like that existed for Maya for years now.

The problem with every 3D painter I've tried has always been that they're always nowhere near as powerful as Photoshop. Even common, simple tools like smudge usually really suck. This thing actually uses Photoshop itself, which is amazing. I'm tempted to learn Max just so I can use Ghostpainter.

If you ever hear of something similar popping up for Maya, please let me know.

I really love it, Chosen. Not only is it great for 3d paint, but PSD manager is a fantastic tool in its own right and can be a huge timesaver when working on stills that you plan to do post work on. It's also considerably cheaper than Bodypaint or Deep Paint 3D.

There are really only two real drawbacks to Ghostpainter. First, it can only work on one texture at a time so you can't paint across the SL avatar's neck or waist seams. I got around that by remapping the avatar into a single UV set.

The other drawback is simply the amount of screen realestate it requires. If you use Photoshop in one of the Max viewports you spend a lot of time moving dialogue boxes and the tool panel and panning your Photoshop document. You can't paint in Max on any portion of the PSD that's not visible in the viewport. That's not a problem though with a dual monitor setup since then there's no need to put PS in the max viewport and you can just keep your 3d view maximized.

Oh, and there's one other drawback shared by all 3rd party plugins for Max. Very often when new versions of Max come out the plugins for the previous version no longer work without the developer doing some fixing and recompiling it. Max 9 has been out since November but if I want to do 3d paint work I have to use Max 8 because Cebas has yet to release an update. It's not a huge deal but it can cause problems if you don't plan ahead. Max files are never backwards compatable. They're only forward compatable. Other than those gripes though Ghostpainter is well worth the money if you already have Photoshop and Max. The best thing of all is that you don't have to learn a new workflow.

Wow, that Ghostpainter video. Amazing...just...wow.

There's also AvPainter, which is nowhere near as fancy as the programs the others have mentioned, but is cheap and better than nothing.

Thanks Miriel. I forgot all about that! It fills the niche left behind by the demise of Tattoo quite nicely.

I will personally double that in $US

hehe, you can make all checks payable directly to me. Thanks you guys

What happened to Tattoo? I used to point it out to newbies who asked me me how to make clothes but it seems to be gone... did the company go bankrupt?

Last time I googled for the link to tell someone about it the link was dead. Not sure if it was temporary or if it's no longer available.

The web address for Tattoo changed a while back, and for some reason Google has a tough time finding it. The new address is http://www.terabit-software.co.uk/

Amusing side-note about Tattoo: it was developed using the same programming environment as I used for SLCP, Blitz3D. I don't know if I mentioned in the SLCP thread here (I know I posted this somewhere,) how the community of people writing games with Blitz3D would routinely just toss off little tools like these every so often. Lightmappers, terrain editors, someone would just whip one up every time we needed something. I wish I could remember more about Lee/terabit specifically.