It depends on what you are mapping. UV mapping programs work like a light beam shining on a spiders web in front of a white wall, and the shadow of that web is your UV map. If the web is flat on to the light and the wall, i.e. all are lined up you get a very accurate shadow and UV map. That is fine for flat objects and objects that are rectangular (box mapping). The problems start with cyclindical and spherical type objects. When you shine that light through the mesh to get the shadow on the wall you get distortions at the sides because the mesh has depth at the sides. Try Planer mapping a Poser figure to see what I mean. The UV mapping that comes inherant with Poser figures is a form of unwrapped mapping, in other words the mesh areas that are compressed on the standard UV map are unwrapped using sophisticated programs. It is possible to do this manually in UV mapper but it is a nightmare. Deep Paint 3d and Bodypaint (as far as I know) use a form of mercator mapping. The old globe map split up into many slices or segments like an orange. This works to an extent on sperical and cylindrical objects. However, there are problems when these objects have indents and protrusions like a human face (the eyes area, nose etc). What happens in all these programs as far as I can see is a compromise. Because if you think about it you are trying to map onto a 2d picture area, an area greater than it can contain. In order to do this distortion of some of the surface has to take place. Alternativly as far as I know when you paint directly onto a model, the map is distorted to compensate. However try over painting that map with a regular square pattern and then render and as far as I know the squares will be distorted. There is one other solution, to map many sections of the mesh seperately to get as many flat or near-flat sections as possible but this would be a nightmare to paint in a 2D program. Just a few thoughts STORM