BodyPaint 3D R2 makes painting 3D models with 2D applications a breeze. © Maxon. Screen captures by Robin Konieczny.

BodyPaint 3D is a paint package for painting onto 3D models and making them look rather spiffy, so your 3D colleagues will bow to your every mouse move, the boss will invite you out for expensive business lunches and all sexes and species will find you instantly attractive. Of course, fame, fortune and awards will then follow and you will be deemed the greatest 3D guru ever to have lived (phew).

Why?
Why use BodyPaint 3D? Well, painting 3D models with 2D applications is a pain, and if you want to speed up your workflow and get superior results, then this is the way to go.

Where?
Right here, right now… possibly on your computer and definitely at www.maxon.net or at your local friendly computer software emporium.

How Much?
Well, it’s priceless… no, hang on — actually, it’s about $745.

The Wilderness Years
So, let’s get a little background info out the way, so that we can have a good look at this rarified creature. Well, I came across BodyPaint 3D about two to three years ago when I was working professionally as a texture artist (doing a lot of work for Passion Pictures) Up until then, I had been unwrapping my meshes and doing all the work in Photoshop, which is effective up to a point, but there were problems:

• Painting seamlessly across surfaces was challenging/impossible
• Texture stretching

The solution to these problems seemed to be to paint in 3D… and at about this time, Deepaint 3D appeared on the scene.

Deepaint?
Well, at the time I was on the Mac, so I couldn’t get Deepaint (Deepaint is PC only). BodyPaint came out for both PC and Mac, so I got BodyPaint, which had tons of features and loads of potential, but didn’t quite cut the mustard; in fact, it couldn’t actually manage to paint across textures, and this turned out to be a major shortcoming, so I moved over to PCs and bought Deepaint, which has projection painting (magic fairy dust inside the software) that allows you to paint across surface seams. I felt exhilarated and kinda dirty at the same time… it was like cheating… suddenly my life became a bit easier, and so poor neglected BodyPaint lay idle on my hard drive, and Deepaint became my texture buddy… until…

Enlightenment
I have to come clean here. I am a BodyPaint Beta tester. Although I like to think I have no allegiances when it comes to software, I am a freelance artist and also have my own company, Asylum3D, so, naturally, I try to use the best tools for the job at hand.

So last year Maxon released BodyPaint 3D version 2 (or R2). This time, Maxon got it right (in my opinion). BodyPaint 3D R2 has an improved interface, so the powerful tools that were always lurking there can now be easily accessed and used. It still has projection paint, but like, on steroids. Raybrush mode, which was always cool, and you can use this to paint on a rendered version of your model and see what it will look like. You can paint on several material channels at one time (e.g. Color, Bump and Specular). Its brushes are second to none and you can save them as preset brushes. Its color picking is pretty smart too. It uses layers, as in Photoshop, and can utilize all of Photoshop’s filters.

BodyPaint also has a good set of UV tools with which to edit your pre-existing UV maps. I like to map in LW then tweak them in BP using the “magnet” tool and the “fit to canvas” command. Also, if you wish, you can re-project your UV maps. BP has Sphere, Cylinder, Frontal, Flat, Cubic, Cubic2, Box and shrink. It also has “optimal” and “realign” functions, which are worth checking out, because as you click on a projection type you can see the texture update in realtime in the 3D view. This is something that can’t be done in LW, so it’s handy. Plus LW has this quirk where you have to un-weld and re-weld points on cylindrical maps, but you can move all your points and polys around in BP without going through the “un-weld” process. All these changes transfer back into LW without any problems, but I don’t know whether this is true for other software such as Maya.

BodyPaint 3D currently has plug-ins for LightWave, Maya, 3ds max, Maxon’s Cinema 4D and, hopefully, will support XSI in the future. I use it in conjunction with LightWave (my main 3D tool) and the connection between the two applications is solid and transparent; in fact, BodyPaint R2 is a stable program all around and a joy to use. I must congratulate Maxon here because they really listened to the criticism from their Beta team and in so doing have produced a very nice piece of software that, well, works. You can paint in 3D, but that’s not all…