Quote - It sounds to me that what you need is a program like Wings3d. (please don't book me a session in the comfy chair, Bryster)

Bryce is my prefered renderer and animator, but when I need to use decals or any other texture that needs similarly precise positioning, I useWings3d because I can do the UV Mapping in there as well as the modelling.

I can export a model made in Bryce, and clean it up in Wings3d, then UVMap it, save as .obj and then reimport back to Bryce to actually use it.

Wings3d by the way is free, and still currently supported with updates and improvements, plus there's a forum here at Rendo for Wings as well, so you don't need to go far.

WingsForum

Wings3d Website

I don't recommend that you use PowerPoint for creating the decals or other images/textures you might want to use, but the GIMP is similar enough to PhotoShop and PaintShop etc that many people can use that to great effect.

(However it's some time since I last used PowerPoint for anything other than slideshows, so maybe its abilities have improved out of all recognition)  The GIMP however I know can do much more.  So if I were you, I'd use GIMP.

I think there are tutorials for GIMP for making decals,  (Try searching for GIMP and Decal tutorials) and I've done a tut for a related thing, doing drips and rust marks for a simple robot (uses Photoshop, but principles are the same.)

Link: UVMappingTutorial

This tut shows the process for UVMapping in Wings3d as well as making the Texture in PhotoShop so some of it should help even if you don't know GIMP so well.

If you know GIMP well, it should be possible to follow the tut doing the same things but in The GIMP.

It is unfortunate that Bryce doesn't yet have any UJVMapping abilities, but maybe that's yet to come.

Good luck.

(P.S. an .obp object with decals correctly positioned does not mean that making and placing decals is possible in Bryce, I do it in Wings3d, save as.obj, import that into Bryce and then I can swop the textures and save each different version as an .obp - because it's been UVMapped elsewhere but Bryce reads the UV corordinates).

PowerPoint will not work for the purposes of UV mapping. I already understand this. It is not possible to import .obj or any other 3D model into PowerPoint as far as I can tell. What is possible is importing .bmp, .jpeg, and other 2D image formats into PowerPoint for modifications. This will not help me with the UV mapping but it works well with DAZ Studio materials files.

Stay awesome!

Agent 0013