Body Paint 3d R2

Nakur

Just picked this up last week, been fooling around with it this weekend.

Anyway, I was wondering if any of you guys have experience with this program. Any specific parts of the program you have found useful, besides the obvious of painting over seams?

Also, the UV Setup Wizard... this seems to make painting the texture instead of directly on the mesh nearly impossible because of how many pieces it breaks the mesh into. Is there any use to be gotten from this, or is unwrapping in Max still standard?

OgrO

I'm still using the old version, but the main interest is, imho, the artistic freedom. You can feel the mesh, and paint it in harmony with it's shapes and volumes. No longer need to make any mental gymnastic from 2D to 3D, then refresh in your 3D soft, etc...
At the end, the 2D work will be so "close" to the 3D support that you will no longer see it as a "2D texture applied on a 3D mesh", but more as a true 3D entity.

The seamless painting is a force, but it's nothing compared to the power you gain in "design".

Nakur

So you do all of your painting directly on the mesh? Does that mean that you don't bother changing the UV's given from the setup wizard? (That is, I'm thinking the only reason to change the UV's is if you wanted to paint onto the texture instead of the mesh. Please correct me if I'm wrong!)

Thanks for the insight, I can't wait to get home and play with it some more.

MoP

It's probably still good practise to unwrap by hand in Max or whatever program you model in. That way you can get the most efficient layout, especially for games, where texture memory is limited, and every extra seam in the UV's creates more UV vertices which means more processing time when the model is in game.
Plus you might wanna come back and edit the texture in Photoshop, or if you're giving the model to someone else to texture too, they want good UV's to work with - an automatic UV generator will never generate as painter- and game-friendly UV's as doing it by hand. Plus you can mirror and stack similar UV segments when doing it by hand, an automatic mapper would not do that.

Nakur

[ QUOTE ]
It's probably still good practise to unwrap by hand in Max or whatever program you model in. That way you can get the most efficient layout, especially for games, where texture memory is limited, and every extra seam in the UV's creates more UV vertices which means more processing time when the model is in game.
Plus you might wanna come back and edit the texture in Photoshop, or if you're giving the model to someone else to texture too, they want good UV's to work with - an automatic UV generator will never generate as painter- and game-friendly UV's as doing it by hand. Plus you can mirror and stack similar UV segments when doing it by hand, an automatic mapper would not do that.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks, just info I was looking for.

OgrO

Yes, as said MoP, good UVs optimize the indexed vertices amount and helps having a better texel repartition. Even if seams are less visible with B3D, they're still here.

Delaney King

Your gonna fall down if you use default settings, those seams will have mip-mapping problems when you get them into a game engine and its gonna be hell to fix it. A good layout is gold mate, GOOOOLLLD... aint that right MOP?