BodyPaint comes to us from the developers of Cinema4D, and it’s now in its third generation. Obviously, with new generations comes more maturity and stability ‘ and new cool features. This handy tool has already established itself with the ability to paint directly on 3D geometry, which isn’t a feat unto itself, but you can paint across multiple layers and UV maps. It also combines a renderer with the viewport GL, which provides a pseudo-IPR way of painting. It’s similar to painting into the rendered image. New features take these tools and increase the usability while keeping up with the available new technologies.
The paint system has been beefed up with painting in float. For the uninitiated, this refers to the fact that there is a lot more information in the colors than in years past. Working in float is essential to be taken seriously in a production environment these days. It provides the latitude to push the color correction and processing to the limit downstream in the pipeline without having to worry about the textures falling apart. Trust me when I tell you that this is a good thing.
New UV management technology is incorporated through LSCM Unwrapping, which means Least Squares Conformal Map, which in regular lingo means that BodyPaint will analyze the geometry and flatten out the UVs using the angle between the polygons as a gauge for how to flatten them out. It essentially creates an atlas of the object’just like the view of the world in your fourth-grade classroom. Furthermore, BodyPaint allows you to Freeze the 3D view while painting. In the past, the artist was limited to the resolution of the viewport for the projection painting. By freezing the view, you can zoom into that perspective for creating highlevel detail in the painting. Overall, some great new features have been added. The product is well-known in the industry and doesn’t have an enormous price tag. BodyPaint 3D offers direct translation plugins for Maya, Softimage XSI, 3ds Max and Lightwave. It could stand for a little revamp in the code to optimize calculations because it’ll bog down somewhat’but this is in direct correlation to the density of the mesh and the size of the maps. If you need to paint texture maps, this is certainly one of the better pieces of software on the market.
Website: www.maxon.net
Price: $895 ?
