hmmm , for modellers if truepace isnt working for you try bender, wings3d or anim8or. All free and blender is very good , but has an odd interface.

For painting I do uvmapping and then use a conventional paint ptogram to do the texture on the map.  GIMP is probaly the best known free paint program. It does layers so many photoshop tutorials can be made to work with it.

The Poser forum is the general purpose forum I suppose. People who use Poser or Daz studio also model, paint , etc etc. For specific questions the application specific forums may be better.

Here I use the forums Poser, Poser technical, python, modelling, Lightwave and photoshop forums depending on the problem.