Utterly minor thing - but one of the few things I've found a bit clanky in max is the poly creation. Has anyone ever written a script or plugin to match, say, the one in XSI? E.g. just drag from edge to edge rather than on a vertex by vertex basis?
place a node that is called "vertex color". Take the alpha channel of it and multiply it by the wind node. The same thing as what you did, but instead of hooking up that texture alpha, hook up the alpha channel of the vertex color node.
I seem to recall a pretty neat rock tutorial in vertex 1. Cant remember which page its on exactly though. You should ckeck it out :) http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=104752&highlight=vertex
If you use Xnormal, Use "Bake Highpoly Vertex Colors", and in the High Definition Meshes menu, uncheck "ignore vertex colors", but only do that after you baked your AO map, for example, or else the polypaint will affect it.
"Push" or inflate works by multiplying the vertex coordinate by a number, and by the avegare vertex normal direction. So basically the vertices will go based on the normals. Depending on the shape, and topology, this can cause it to go to a direction that is not exactly what you wanted.
You'd still need to write a shader - vertex colours are just vertex colours. You can get the source code for all of the built-in shaders from here; http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/2085-Builtin-Unity-shaders-source
amisima: how do you use mudbox to change vertex order? i agree that vertex order is the most likely cause and easy to terst using the morph modifier. you can fix it in max using the morphix script.
You could probably "paint" it in using vertex normals (so it's easier to visualise, if you turn the normal indicators on) and hack a script together to transfer that to a colour map. And then bake that out to a texture if needed, or leave it as a per vertex thing.
or use vertex color channel blending to blend 2 different tiling textures, its called vertex blending here is a tutorial on how to apply it in max: http://www.bakdesign.net/tm/tutorial/3dsmax_tutorial.html most engines these days support it
for lowpoly i always use 100% fullbright, because that will show the texture itself and how well it was painted , sure that ingame it will be lit per vertex, and omnis and stuff will give horrible per vertex lightning and wash out the texture.