Poor Man's 3D Paint Program?

[Argh]

Found this little thing while browsing the Ogre forum:

http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=57518

I haven't tested it yet, but it looks like it might be cute for doing initial color work for marking boundaries and such. Probably has giant problems on texture seams, though, and other issues, since it's very alpha, so be warned. If it works well, let that guy know, maybe he'll add some features and polish it for serious uses.

[Beherith]

I would love it if it had burn/dodge as well next to just blending. Seems like this is the kind of thing that could have some serious professional support.

Arent there already better solutions to this issue? I would really like to be able to seamlessly paint onto my 3d models with the minimum complexity of photoshop brushes.

[bobthedinosaur]

wow. i will try it out. one thing you can do even if you dont like the brushes is use a line tool to go across unconnected UV edges and then save it and re open in your preferred graphic program and then use the lines as guides.

[thesleepless]

tried blender's texture paint mode?

[bobthedinosaur]

what? blender has paint?

[Wombat]

tried blender's texture paint mode?

what ? tell me more plz OoOOOoh Great One

[bobthedinosaur]

Sleepless, mind posting a short tut on using blender's painting features?

[Wombat]

u think zbrush is good texture/painting program for mechanical models ?

[Master-Athmos]

I'd rather go for 3D Coat than Z-Brush...

Sleepless, mind posting a short tut on using blender's painting features?

Why don't you just google for it? You'll get plenty of results. If you want to watch someone just playing around with it look e.g. at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R_65BvL_bw

[Hoi]

Don't use a 3d painting program exept if you can use the 2d ones and know what you're doing. They are mainly for characters with tons of polygons.

[rattle]

Nope, 3D paint programs good for low poly stuff as well.

I can recommend BodyPaint 3D (commercial), it's quite powerful and uses the PSD format. Also, newer revisions of Photoshop support 3D objects and live painting, although I'm not really fond of it.

What's this good for? Well lighting for one thing. If you ever have to paint the lighting on because your model is for a lower spec engine you'll be happy as joy when you can see the entire model and put your light reflexions where they belong instead of going step by step, face by face with a 2D program. Most of the other work will still be done in your 2D painting program...

[bobthedinosaur]

Cs4 supports 3d, i should have waited.

[PicassoCT]

They are great for sketching out a first texture- but the mainwork is still photoshoop

[Argh]

Arent there already better solutions to this issue? I would really like to be able to seamlessly paint onto my 3d models with the minimum complexity of photoshop brushes.

Absolutely, but they all cost money, other than Blender's paint interface (which is, like everything Blender, a bit scary to use).

Anyhow, be sure to let that guy know you'd like to see more features- the thing I missed most was texture-stamping, but Dodge / Burn and blend modes are also important. A lower-quality-but-free middleware application for the free community like that might be really nice, if it gets somewhere. Ever since Zbrush came out, there hasn't been a lot that's free and even halfway decent.

As for utility... if you're making normalmaps and such, stuff like Zbrush and 3DCoat are very useful for working with subdivision models (although the last time I tested either, they still had pretty major problems with meshes that had been triangulated previously, since they were primarily developed for box-modelers).

These days, you can do a detailed high-rez mesh, pre-paint the details so they're easy to see (buttons, for example) and export the results pretty fast.

Hand-painting normalmaps with grayscale works just fine, though, if you know how to do that.

[KDR_11k]

BTW, dodge and burn are not recommended, for a better color curve it's better to set up a palette of shades for your material and then paint with those.

Highpoly models are ALWAYS quad based, if you triangulate those you're DOIN' IT WRONG. Triangles are BAD, you want to avoid them as much as possible in most cases. ZBrush is used to add details to highpoly models, for normalmapping you use that for a projection, not to paint normals on your lowpoly model. Hand painted normalmaps are usually called bumpmaps because they fill a different role, a projected normalmap is used to make a low poly model appear like it's the highpoly model it got the projection from while bump maps are more for surface texturing that you wouldn't model, e.g. cloth material or hair.

[Argh]

BTW, dodge and burn are not recommended, for a better color curve it's better to set up a palette of shades for your material and then paint with those.

Yeah, airbrushing out with some selected shades is better, in terms of color control, but it really depends. Sometimes you need to do a pass over a lot of different colors in an area, and then dodge and burn, used carefully, are a good way to arrive at a good result quickly.

You certainly don't want to use those tools with high exposure rates though, that can cause a lot of problems with washout as you lose value.