I have a chance to purchase a new copy of Painter 3D for a good price and was wondering if anyone out there is using it with Poser and other applications. I recently downloaded UV Mapper thinking that it would be a simpler way to make my own textures in Photoshop than buying a new application. Any thoughts?

Painter 3d came with my copy of Poser 4. That was when metacreations owned both. I have tried to use it and did not like it all. If I were you I would stick with UVmapper and Photoshop. If you want to spend some money hold off and buy UVmapper Pro. According to the UVmapper site its due out shortly and its going to be really awesome. For that matter UVmapper is awesome. The longer I use it the cooler I realize it is. Just my opinion for what ever its worth.

I can't help you there. Painter and Mapper, pretty much take up room on my hard drive.

I also have Painter 3D from the content CD-ROM that came with Poser 4. It's uh, less than intuitive.

I have used P3D to define mapping: where front and back match up, what is where on the face, etc. It seems to have all of the difficulties that come with learning Painter 6/7 without much of the real function. It does allow you to get right at a location, but the flaw in the program that produces a streak when you cross a seam is a major irritation.

I think any version of Painter is going to be a pain in the butt as far as the learning curve. I do like their colour wheel setup, and a lot of the brushes and "specials" since I have to do all painting with a mouse instead of a tablet. From what I've been told, BodyPaint is the one to look for.

If you can get it "on the cheap" then go for it. The full version of Painter3D (notSE) is a very good painting program in it's own right & is similar in function to Painter 5.0. It includes layers (floaters) which are great to paint on & "nudge" into position on your model. Also has a great variety of paper textures (rice paper, crackles, pavement, eggshell etc.) which make for nice bump maps. Terrific amount of art brushes, filters, image hose nozzels etc. There is a steep learning curve to it as there are so many options. Also, it is much easier to create your base texture map in UVMapper & use that to apply as an "existing" texture map to your imported model instead of trying to create it within Painter. The problem with UVWrapping (as Jaager pointed out) can be solved by creating masked selections to paint within. That way you won't paint over a hand that may lay between the front & back of the torso. Or, you could create a seperate layer for each "front & back" for each part & and paint upon that layer. I.E., make a new layer with just the front & back for the head only etc.