[houchenk]

I am looking for a 3d painting solution that will work with Maxwell-

Say for example I have a (for the sake of example, a rhino model) model of a Stock car- I want to be able to paint the colors and decals on the car and then dump back into Maxwell to render the final image- would z-brush be a good solution for this?

Any tips for a complete Noob in the 3d painting arena would be greatly appreciated-

[JCAddy]

Zbrush would definitely work for this but you should also look at Bodypaint (I think that's the name) for painting directly on objects and getting a diffuse map from that.

[macray]

Bodypaint is the things you should have a look at.

see here if this might be what you like: http://www.maxon.net/pages/products/bod ... t3d_e.html

[simmsimaging]

My take is that BP does things that Zb can't, but that may have changed with ZB3 - haven't got too far into that yet

If you decide to go with Bodypaint I *highly* recommend 3DKiwi's tutorial dvd. I got a ton out of it, but it was also one of the first things I did with 3D so maybe it has less to offer others. Regardless, it's a fantastic training tool for BP - it's one of the more extensive guides for any software package I've seen.

(Not sure if he's released a version for BP3, but it's so close to 2.5 it probably doesn't matter.)

http://www.c4dcafe.com/3dkiwi/bpshop/index.html

b

[houchenk]

body paint looks cool, but how does it work with maxwell? Once you have a model painted up in BP, how do you get the textures back into maxwell? I assume that BP does not offer Nurbs support?

any users out there with success stories to share?

[Mihai]

Well, you just get regular 2D textures out of Bodypaint. The point with it is you can paint directly on the 3D model, but you're still painting to a 2D texture which is applied to that 3D model.

[simmsimaging]

I don't know about nurbs support - if C4D has it then BP will since BP3 is essentially c4d 10 with a few things hidden (on that note, it can actually be smarter to just by c4d10 since it includes BP3. When I got it it was only marginally more expensive that way).

We use Max over here, so the easiest workflow is to use the export plug-in for Max and it ports your object over to BP for editing. As Mihai said though, you just get 2D textures out of it so you don't have to work right out of your 3D app, it's just handy that way.

In any case, it doesn't really "work" with Maxwell, you just use it to develop maps that you apply to your materials in your 3D app and render with Maxwell.

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[jfrancis]

Has anyone tried painting on a 3D model in Photoshop CS3 Extended? - is this an option?

[simmsimaging]

Not really. You can just drop 2d maps on them and see them in 3d but you can't actually work on them like you can in BodyPaint. It seems that is the direction it's going though.

b

[jfrancis]

Not really. You can just drop 2d maps on them and see them in 3d but you can't actually work on them like you can in BodyPaint. It seems that is the direction it's going though.

b

oh, that's too bad. I hope they do go that way

[Mihai]

http://www.electriciris.com/

Plugin for Photoshop allowing you do to just that. Seems to be pretty good.

[jfrancis]

http://www.electriciris.com/

Plugin for Photoshop allowing you do to just that. Seems to be pretty good.

Wow! Great post!