Many thanks for the input so far!**

Gog**: As far as I'm concerned, UV mapping and texturing are two separate cans of worms. There are a number of 3d painting programs such as ZBrush, 3D-Coat etc that supposedly let one paint over seams. Some of them have clone tools. So I would imagine one could do the bulk of the texturing in Photoshop or Gimp etc, then fix the seams in one of those 3d programs. I haven't really done any serious texturing yet, so I don't know how practical that idea is.

Don't get me wrong, having a UV-aware photoshop plugin or somesuch that could deal with seams directly in UV space is still a very neat idea. Not exactly what I had in mind originally, but maybe something I could keep in the back of my head.

Regarding the Blender thing: I was considering doing a plugin or extension for Blender or Wings3D first. But that would require me to immerse myself in the respective API and inner workings and, in the case of Wings3D, a new programming language. If I do a standalone program, I don't have the infra-structure that comes with an existing sophisticated modeling package, but on the other hand I can dive straight into coding without having to learn any new tricks. It's a bit of a tradeoff, and I admit I am not completely decided on which way to go. But I guess I'll try a simple standalone first and see how it goes.

The other aspect of course is that if I'm intending to turn this into profit at some point, a standalone might be easier to handle.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.