BodyPaint 3D 2 review

BodyPaint 3D from Maxon is a painting program that uses UV mapping to apply textures to 3D models in real time.

It can be installed as a standalone program or as a module in its parent program, Cinema 4D. In the latter case, the BodyPaint interface is simply another one of Cinema's task-specific interfaces and integrates seamlessly with the host program, obviating the need for import/export between the two programs.

Version 2 now contains a three-step setup wizard that allows you to treat your model on a per-object or per-material basis and assign UV maps according to either cubic, angle or realignment mapping. The important thing here is that the algorithms avoid overlapping any polygons when the UVs are imposed onto the texture map.

You can also choose whether to predefine, which channels to paint in, and what the initial fill colour of the channels is. You can also select how large you want your texture maps to be, or you can let BodyPaint calculate optimal sizes for your maps. The larger a map, the more detail can be painted, but this will slow down the program along with any application in which the objects are subsequently used.

To get textures onto your objects you first design brushes and then paint with them. If you're familiar with any standard 2D bitmap programs, then the Brush options will be immediately familiar to you. size, edge hardness, blending mode, angle and so on are all catered for, as is the ability to define a Brush shape by using a bitmap.

Version 2 introduces the idea of multi-channel brushes: attributes such as colour, specularity, bump or transparency can be painted onto the object simultaneously, rather than applied one channel at a time as in previous versions. This can be a great time-saver, but each channel needs its own RAM allocation, so this can slow down your machine if you don't have sufficient memory (about 1Gb is the comfort zone).

Give a little bristle

We came across some snags when setting up brushes. The Brush interface takes quite a bit of getting used to and can appear over-complex and unintuitive on first use. Confusingly, there are two Colours tabs, one of which defines colours, while the other is for saved preset colours.

You build up a library of brush effects by saving preset brushes and colours, and BodyPaint comes with a selection of natural-material brushes from German company Dosch Design. However, when you come to save a brush as a preset, you'll notice you can't amend preset brushes. Any tweaks you may want to make to an already-saved preset must be saved as a new preset. BodyPaint compounds this difficulty by allowing you to save multiple preset brushes with the same name, which is a definite no-no.

BodyPaint also contains industrial-strength UV-manipulation tools. While the setup wizard does a good job of generating the UVs, there are always cases where custom manipulation of the UV polygons will be required to get the best fit and mapping.

Although BodyPaint doesn't ship with a printed manual, the CD has a series of video tutorials to guide you through most areas of the program, albeit at breakneck speed. Also, some of the tutorials seem to assume a prior high-level knowledge of UV editing, which is a shame, as the original BodyPaint manuals were exemplary. There's a printed tutorial manual, but it only contains the text of the video tutorials and no images,. The full printed manual is available for £45.

Since BodyPaint is available as a standalone version, it also ships with plug-ins that allow it to work with LightWave and Maya, swapping models between them and adding the live 3D painting to these programs, although the original UV and materials setup must be done in the either Maya or LightWave. BodyPaint 2 works like magic: it gives you true 3D painting and adds this capability to two of the most popular programs on the Mac, but it really deserves better in the way of documentation.