SUPER 3D PAINT Back to software index Making something in 3D, like a character, is a long process with mostly manual work. While the modeling part is quite fun, the steps involved when doing UVs and texturing feel unnecessary complex and cumbersome. Very often on forums and on 3D sites, you see people do wonderful gray-shaded models, but not everyone moves on to getting their model properly textured. There's two rather difficult steps that needs to be done. Step one: Unwrap hell The first step is to unwrap the model geometry into something called the UV space. The UV coordinates decide how the mapping is supposed to stay on the model, and it's very very important to get this right in order to avoid distortions and misalignments. There are automatic methods available, but I haven't found any system that does a well thought out UV layout in a consistent scale. So I do it manually. The small illustration below show the start and end of that process. I started out with this baby head. The head is then exploded or unwrapped into hundreds of tiny pieces. All the tiny bits and pieces must be manually be pieced together before you can start painting on the geometry. The third image show how I pieced together the UVs for this head. As you can see, it is still separated into pieces. It's impossible to have a detailed organic object like this in one piece without distortions, so it's better to divide it properly and try to keep the seams in areas where they won't show. The last image above show the head with a green checkerboard texture applied. Notice how all the checkers are of a similar size across the face. This will minimize any problems when painting the texture later, and it will render better. There is no automatic mapping method I know that will keep the checkers the same size all across a complex organic model, that's the reason for the manual work. Step two: Painting dilemma After spending two or three days UVing a detailed character, you can finally start painting textures on it. Now this should be the fun part, because that's what painting is - fun, right? Well, not quite so. You are either left with painting directly on the UV layout, which is really counter-intuitive since you can't really see what part goes where. Or you are forced to use one of the 3D paint applications that are out there, and they are all (in my opinion) crap! There is no program that beats the feeling of drawing in Photoshop, period. (Okay, maybe Painter, but it's not gonna help us here.) Well, I can live with doing the UVs manually. It's a pain in the ass, but I see no way around it. However, I refuse accepting that I can't use my favourite software for the drawing part! Why should I use all these bad attempts at paint software, when the Photoshop icon is winking at me on my desktop? Unfortunately Photoshop is a 2D paint application, and there is no way you can import a 3D model into the software and draw on it. Not anymore! I have programmed a bridge between 3ds max and Photoshop - the wünderbar SUPER 3D PAINT! How does it work? It works great! Here's a brief run-through: First, you open up your model in 3ds max. In a perspective view, you rotate the model to the angle where you want to start painting. When you're ready, you click the "Export view for paint" button. 3ds max will do some work, and then the rendered viewport will open up in Photoshop. When you have the rendered view inside Photoshop, you can start drawing on a dedicated texture layer inside the new file. Additional layers contain the wireframe, lighting and original texture. These layers can be hidden if you want in order to help out the drawing. When you are done drawing, save and close the render in Photoshop, return to 3ds max and press the "Import painted texture" button. 3ds max will re-project your Photoshop paint work into the object UV coordinates and paste it over your previous texture. Your texture is then updated inside 3ds max to show your Photoshop work. See the illustration above, compare the resulting texture map with the UVs at the top of this page. After that, you can rotate to a new angle and export to Photoshop for more painting. Repeat until done. As you can see, it's not as simple as having a 3D model inside Photoshop, but I find it miles better than working in any of the dedicated 3D paint packages. You get to use all your favourite Photoshop brushes, and you are free to use any Photoshop tool such as cloning, selections and layers. You can even clone from another image in Photoshop, such as a photo, over to your texture. Neat! It's really a huge improvement over having to draw directly on your UVs, and you can even paint across seams without any problems. I like it a lot, and it's how I texture my models. How can I get this? So why isn't this available? Well, right now that would not be possible. It only works on my setup, when going downhill, and with the wind on my back. In other words, it's far from idiot proof, very easy to break and will get you into serious problems. I really don't have time to provide support if something fails, and it most likely will fail. That's why I'm not planning on distributing it at the moment. However, I would like to see this developed into a proper plugin/application. So if there are any programmers out there who would like to do something with this, please send me an email! For those of you that need something like this right now, the excellent Polyboost plugin has a similar feature built in, although it lacks some of my neat functionality. 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