3d painting app?

Pontus used to use the Viewport Canvas in Max to give his models a basic diffuse pass, but you need to do most of your texturing in PS. You could also use polypaint/mudbox if you like, but I suppose that's mainly for high poly stuff. What exactly are you texturing, or are you just trying to learn different techniques?

I you want to do some projection texturing you have 2 kind of mode : canvas projection or photo projection.

Mudbox and zBrush do both.

Canvas projection : you can go inside photoshop, paint, and then project on your mesh the changes. (Blender handle it quite well too.)

Photo projection : your are inside your app, your photo/texture is on the viewport and where you paint you project the detail.

You can do the canvas projection with 3DSMax/Maya too.

Enjoy :

I have never tried Mari. It looks expensive for what is it and maybe not designed for game art.

(Well, maybe I'm wrong about this last point)

i've been looking into this as well, i tried 3dcoat and it;s ok but kinda unintuitive when using somethign more compelx than simple brushes. zbrush is in theory decent for this but i don't know just how much time it saves and some of the workflow can be really fucking nanoying. haven't tried it with mudbox. photoshops own 3d painting app is a memory hog, slow and pretty much not an option unless someone knows somethign i don't.

going to look at mari now and see what's up.

I personally use the material editor (slate) and viewport canvas in 3ds Max as much as possible to texture. If there is something that needs extra care... I prefer using Mudbox. I feel like using Photoshop/PHOTO-PAINT/Gimp for texturing 3d objects is unintuitive... (but I haven't tried any plugin for these to actually paint in 3D inside them).

What I like about using viewport canvas is that you are in your final environment and have immediate access to tools that are otherwise not likely available--for example... making a mask layer based on selected faces; if you want to do that once you are in another app... you'll probably need to go back into Max and make it... then bring it into your app. I like reducing the number of apps I'm in at one time.

I find 3Dcoat to be quite useful for painting over a model, the brushes are quite basic, but it's nice to get a global base for your colors. You can also export your layers to photoshop and reciprocally which is quite nice if you want to use textures or contrast/hues in photoshop.

i saw a thread just like this on polycount a week ago everyone there seamed to agree that 3dcoat is alright everything else is rubbish

Also : for a base textool camera mapping is nice too. But you can't use layers

i used bodypaint 3d and i love it. ive found its the 3d painting app that is closest to photoshop. only thing is adjustment layers dont work, but it imports them anyway so it doesnt mess up your PSD. you just gotta collapse some parts to make it look like it does in photoshop.