Digital Art Zone

Fairly new to this and am trying to find out the best way to paint the Mil cat.  I have Daz Studio 4.5, Hexagon and photoshop 5.  Ideally I would like to do this in a 3d paint tool vs. unwrapped.  So far I haven’t been able to find any posts or references to any tutorials about this.  Any help pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.

I doubt if you will find any tuts on painting the Mil Cat.  The easiest way would be to get the template (UV Map) from the product page if there is one, and use that as a template in Photoshop.  3D painting would be a bit easier, and you could download the trial version of 3D Coat which does that very well.  There is a learning curve of course, but it is a 30 day fully functional trial, and you can save your work.  You would not be able to sell or give away anything that you make, it would be strictly for your own use.

C4D’s Bodypaint is another good one, but is pretty expensive.

Hexagon does have 3D painting, but not as far as I know true projection painting - I don’t think it will paint, or clone, across a seam. You may want to look at Blender, which does do that I think.

Yes, Blender’s 3D painting can paint across seams.  It is a pretty fair 3D painting implementation, but still not as fully functional as a dedicated app,

I painted my pussy with fur in Carrara
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyjhuRM10HY
here’s the result, freebie. unrestricted use

You can find a series of video files that may help at this site:  http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/hexagon/2/videos/start

Thanks everyone for all your help.  Here is what I have tried and what has happened.

First I saved the Mil cat as an obj. file and tried to import it into Scuptris (which is rather cool by the way, except for this model).  When I tried to import it, it failed with a Mesh error ” Too many triangles connected to an edge (max2)”.  I have no idea what to do with that.  So just to try something else, I did the same thing with the Genesis model and it loaded fine.  errrr!

Then I tried “Send to Hexagon” from Daz Studio to see if that would work and it loads fine and looks good.  I just can’t get it to work correctly in UV & Paint.

I am guessing that I don’t understand how to create the right kind of projection before trying to paint.

Did I mention that I am a rookie at this, but after watching a good tutorial on how to use UV & Paint in Hexagon, it didn’t look that difficult. Hexagon has more than adequate paint features for what I need to do.

I have never tried Hexagon paint since I have Carrara and if you watched my video, you would see how easy it is to use.
you do not ofcourse need a furred model, that was just a bit of fun when I first got my decent desktop with a graphics card that handled that sort of realtime fur texture preview!

Wendy, that is a pretty wild looking kitty. Very nice.  Do you have to select a particular UV mapping or projection in Carrara before you paint?  I am not sure if I stated that correctly.  Regarding the furring, are you familiar with “Look at my Hair”.

http://look-at-my-hair.blogspot.com/  It i.s quite amazing and unfortunately, not available yet.

So now for the real ingnorant question.  My understanding is that the file needs to go under My Library somewhere, but I don’t know which folder to put it in.  I also am not sure where in the Surfaces Editor in DAZ I select it and apply it to my model.

you just go to the surfaces tab and select diffuse for the fur, browse for image and add it wherever you have it
you can stick it in the bump too if you want
I just painted on the cat with the uv’s at default
changing them would mean I would have to load an obj saved into surfaces,, import uv for the new uv’s (now I have lost you I bet!)

Thanks Wendy.  That will work great for now.  I still want to understand how to do the UV projection in Hexagon in order to paint models there.  So more snooping on the internet.  I appreciate your help.

Alan