Which software do you guys recomend and why?

i'm looking for something easy to use and that works well with poser.

If you mean you have a 3d model and you want to paint directly on it, rather than painting on a flat 2d uv map, the serious choice is ZBrush. Why? Well, a quick visit to ZBrush Central will show you what the pro's are creating with it. It has limitations .. no layers yet, shaders can't be exported, and painting is done using 'projection' .. ie the model has to be static when you paint on it, using Projection Master. This means you can't pan around the model adding a dab here and a dab here. Instead you need to 'drop' the model, paint on the surface you can see, pick it up, rotate the model, drop it again, paint, pick up etc. It soon becomes intuitive, but isn't perfect. However, you can paint several effects at the same time .. displacement, cavity shading, colour, texture and an alpha bump all at the same time, for example. And using a recent (free!) plug in you can have a copy of Photoshop open and interactively alter your texturing in real time.

And for occasions when you want to paint a flat picture which looks like it's 3d, there's nothing to touch ZBrush.

it really depends on how much you want to spend and what features you want. the most photoshop like program for 3D painting is Bodypaint3D from Maxon. This is what many of the big Production studios like Sony Pictures use. the price is pretty high though. Bodypaint has multiple material zone and full layer support. it paints in both projection and direct painting modes. another option is Deep Paint by Right hemisphere, this is probably the most popular 3D painting tools but its showing its age a bit and by some accounts Deep Hemisphere has stopped updating it, and its PC only its also fairly pricey it has pretty much all the options of Bodypaint (though you have to purchase the seperate Deep UV if you want to uv map in it. a third option is Modo 201, this is a full modeling Painting and rendering program. The painting and rendering features are brand new. again not inexpensive but for the price you get one of the best modelers on the market and probably the most innovative 3D paint system on the market. Zbrush has been covered by Moochie, its a great tool though I find its interface maddening personally. Another newcomer in the 3d Painting market is hexagon, very easy to use, but its painting features are fairly limited, only single layer painting, no projection painting, but it will do displacement painting which none of the previous tools except ZBrush does directly. Hexagon is also the cheepest of the bunch.

You can also do 3d paint with Blacksmith 3D suite and Hexagon 2.

bB

ZBrush also has issues with the mapping of a lot of stuff that causes it to be unusable for a number of people, myself included. It doesn't like multiple map UVs at all.

Sounds like bodypaint3d is the best one

i'll download the demo and try it. thanks guys. :)