Does anyone know how to take a lets say plain texture and then color it directly on a 3d model? I know i can make a texture in photoshop and then apply it in max. But is there a way I can see the texture update in realtime while wrapped around a 3d model? Thanks, Screamer

This is not the most trivial problem in 3D graphics, but most modeling packages do implement this kind of operation nowadays.

Given a point on the screen, you need to resolve the UV coordinate of the model projected to that point. This can be achieved by intersecting a ray (from eye point to screen point) and the mesh, finding the first triangle that said ray collides with, solving the barycentric coordinates of the intersection point inside said triangle, and weighting the UV coordinates of said triangle with the said barycentric coordinates.

After that, you just put a "blob" of paint on the texture on the found UV coordinate. At this point, it is a 2D operation in texture space.

There are a lot more steps to refine the painting experience, but the essentials are explained above.

That said, I recommend Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended or Blender for this type of work [smile] I don't remember whether Max has this functionality out of the box, but it did have a 3rd party plugin called GhostPainter that integrated with Photoshop for exactly the purpose of painting textures on 3D models.

Check out the polypainting method of painting textures using Pixologic's ZBrush.

Cheers!

Thanks for the tips!