skycastleMud 11 November 2008 08:19 PM

But I agree about quality and workflow being rather poor…

I guess include resolution and speed with quality. For example on a single mesh in Mudbox 2009 I can paint across 2 side by side 4096x4096 texture maps on my 32 bit OS using an 8800GTX graphics card. I can paint this in real time and rotate and view all colors while I paint.

If you are limited to painting `vertex colors`, to match this resolution, you would need to subdivide to 33,554,432 million points to equal the quality in Mudbox. This would present major issues for you on 32 bit OS if you could do it at all. Even if you could then in the end you need to bake the vertex color into a texture which this also introduces filtering issues where you again loose quality.

This is what I was referring to about the quality and workflow issue. Subdividing vertex points for 3d painting is just not the most efficient approach to painting high quality texture maps.

that’s very true, maybe this paper might help address some of those issue if you paint on implementing such a feature in the future:

http://www.cemyuksel.com/research/meshcolors/meshcolors_techreport.pdf