Why 2D Painting is Never Enough for 3D Textures

Textures can make or break your 3D image and experienced artists know the issues involved with creating 3D textures in a 2D application.

Immediate feedback
Graphics applications designed for 2D do not take into account your scene's lighting or the effect of different material channels. BodyPaint 3D does that and more with its unique RayBrush feature. Rather than saving, reloading and rendering textures you can paint in real-time on a rendered image and see the results of reflection, transparency, bump and more.

Tools, tools, tools
More than 200 presets put a wide array of natural media and special effects brushes within easy reach. Clone, Smear, Sponge, Dodge and Burn, Gradient, Magic Wand, transform tools and more are all available within the easy to use interface.

Distortion-free painting
No matter how hard you try - UVs will never be 100% perfect. Some parts will be slighty scaled, distored or twisted because you are trying to project a 3D object onto a 2D plane. And you have to have this in mind while painting your textures in 2D. Sometimes this produces unpredictable results. BodyPaint 3D's projection painting takes all this into account and projects your texture the way you intended it to look on the 3D object you were painting on.

32-bit color depth and HDR editing
You can paint in up to 32-bit color depth, which gives even more texture control and incredibly smooth color gradations. BodyPaint 3D also enables editing of HDR and EXR formats letting you to use these powerful formats in your 3D scenes.

Painting over multiple objects
BodyPaint 3D can paint over multiple objects using a single stroke. Projection painting allows distortion-free painting across multiple objects to eliminate seams and get the results you want - which is not possible in 2D!

Painting multiple textures at once
With BodyPaint 3D you can paint an entire material with a single stroke. Each brush can paint up to ten channels simultaneously, so a single brushstroke can affect Color, Bump, Specularity, Reflection, Transparency and other properties. There is no need to match the various channels in your 3D application.

Direct connection to your 3D application
Creating textures using 2D applications and including these in your 3D scene involves a lot of manual setup and a lot of application switching. BodyPaint 3D offers plugins to easily exchange models, textures and UVs between BodyPaint 3D and popular 3D applications like 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage and LightWave 3D.