I have used and loved DeepPaint for many years and written a review and a number of tutorials on it. The review and tutorials can be found on the Right Hemisphere web site or on either of my web sites. When I started painting on 3 dimensional surfaces, I wanted to try DeepPaint 3D and Texture Weapons.

DeepPaint 3D (dp3) is a multifaceted program. As in Deep Paint, one can paint or clone an object; however, in this program, one can do a whole lot more. In other words, it has the tools to paint in 2-dimensions and 3-dimensions; and, also, in 21/2-dimensions which I will explain within the body of the review. This program can be used as a stand-alone or as a Photoshop plugin. One can purchase it with or without Texture Weapons. The latter is a program for working with and altering meshes. For the purposes of this review, I will discuss DeepPaint 3D with Texture Weapons. It is a system intensive program. The system requirements are:

• Microsoft Windows 95, 98, NT 4, or Windows 2000 with IE 4.0 or later
• A Pentium 200-MMX processor or better
• At least 64 MB of RAM
• A minimum resolution of 800 x 600 pixels with 1024 x 768 for Texture Weapons
• A Graphic card capable of displaying 16-bit color
• A CD-ROM drive for Installation.

However, Right Hemisphere strongly recommends:

• A Wacom Intuos or similar pressure sensitive tablet
• A Pentium III 500 processor or better
• At least 256MB of Ram
• A graphic card capable of displaying 32-bit color
• Windows 2000

The system requirements in the manual that accompanies the program are slightly different than those on the web. This is, possibly because in the manual, both DeepPaint 3D and Texture Weapons are considered a unit as far as the listing of requirements.

In order to understand why this program needs a powerful system, the following table should be useful.

*Using RGB and a 32-bit depth

The program comes with an Introduction and Getting Started Guide and a book of tutorials. There is an extensive and excellent manual which can be printed, and there are a lot of tutorials on the Right Hemisphere web site which are excellent. The tutorials in the tutorial's book can, also, be downloaded from the web site.

DeepPaint 3D with Texture Weapons sells for about $1290.00 (US). DeepPaint 3D sells for about $795.00 (US) and Texture Weapons sells for about $495.00 (US).

I will break down this review into discussing the products separately and then discussing how they interact. A tutorial on using Deep Paint 3D with Poser will accompany this review.

As stated earlier, dp3 can be used in three forms: 2d, 2 1/2d, or 3d.

• 2 1/2-d is similar to the format of DeepPaint. It is used to create a 2-dimensional painting using color, bump, and shine. The tutorials that I wrote for DeepPaint will all apply to this mode of painting. While the tutorials I wrote refer to cloning, straight painting follows the same principles.
• 3-d mode is active whenever a 3-d model is opened in dp3. It adds additional channels such as glow and opacity.
• 2-d mode is the mode used to view and paint directly on an unwrapped mesh.

While the above modes specifically refer to dp3, Texture Weapons is highly desirable because in order to paint on a UV mesh, this mesh must be mapped. Texture Weapons will map this mesh using MercatorUV. It will also do a lot more to modify and refine this mesh. The uses for Texture Weapons will be discussed later in the review.

What makes part of this program so unique is that it has many facets and separate but united areas. The simplest level is the 2 1/2 D mode. Here one can paint a picture directly on the canvas or use the cloning mode to recreate a picture. Some brush strokes are pictured below.

Many varied brushes can be used in cloning. What is so great is that any brush can become a cloner, so the possibilities are limitless. These sections of an image are taken from a Photoshop file.

Original	Cloned

DeepPaint 3D is very easy to use. The interface is intuitive; there are quite a few tools; and brushes are very easy to customize and save. The illustration below left is a compilation showing the tool bar and the command panel. The middle image shows the command panel showing the brushes I am customizing for my tutorial on using DeepPaint 3D to paint a Poser figure. The right image shows more areas for brush customization.

Brushes, to, me are one of the key elements that make both DeepPaint and DeepPaint 3D stand out. They are very easy to create and customize with more than enough options, but not so many options that these lead to confusion.

When working in 3D mode, each channel can be accessed regardless of the number of layers. One can work on individual layers that, like Photoshop layers, can be adjusted for opacity. When exported, the individual channel maps are exported separately.

The various icons in the image on the left refer to some of the various settings, presets, etc. that can be adjusted. The current screen shot shows the various layers that I have used as well as the fact that I have only used the color channel to create a map. These layers can, then, be merged if desired. When the map is exported to Photoshop, the layers remain in tact and can be further edited in Photoshop.

Texture Weapons is the program that is used for all mesh manipulation. It can be used as simply part of DeepPaint 3-D or as a plugin to a few software packages such as 3D StudioMax. If the image that is brought into DeepPaint does not have a UV map associated with it, one can be created by the Mercator UV tools. Different parts of an image can be mapped differently to create the best possible texture map. An arm, since it is tubular in shape can be mapped using Cylindrical UV mapping, for example, and the head of an object can be mapped using Spherical UV mapping. Through the use of Mercator, seamless distortion free mapping can be accomplished easily. This makes working with 3-D models much much easier.

Earlier when discussing painting using DeepPaint 3D, I was describing regular painting. However, often one will want to paint over a UV seam, etc. One can do this using the Projection paint mode which is a component of Texture Weapons.

The two printscreens below show a previously mapped object that was brought into DeepPaint 3D . The screen on the left shows the separate parts of the object, and the screen on the right is a magnified shot of the head. There are many tools in the Texture Weapons module of this program to manipulate and work on maps. There are many tools that are out of my range of in-depth knowledge. As a novice, however, to UV mesh manipulation, I was pleasantly surprised at how easily I could modify a UV map. My only complaint was that I could not save a map while I was working on it, so since I was not skilled at using mapping techniques, I had to restart a few times.

The Right Hemisphere web site lists a lot of the features found in Texture Weapons. This list can be found by clicking on Texture Weapons. In addition, a full working demo can be downloaded. I am always extremely happy when I see a site with a downloadable demo. This, in my opinion, is the best way to try out a product.

If you are unfamiliar with 3D painting or familiar but not with this product, I suggest downloading the demo and then the tutorials. I believe the demo lasts for 15 days. So put aside some blocks of time and experiment.

Also, the Right Hemisphere web site has more product information on DeepPaint 3D than is contained, naturally, in this review. This program is too powerful to list all of its features in one short review.

I need to mention that I had problems with DeepPaint 3D under both Windows 98 SE and Windows 2000. I duplicated the pattern on two machines with Windows 98 SE and a machine with Windows 2000. While the person responsible for sending me this program to review was highly concerned, in more than a month of contacting tech support, I never got an answer to this specific problem. This problem did not really affect my work. It was annoying, but that was all. What happened was that every time I decided to just close a file or exit and close the file without saving either my presets and/or my file, I would get "Illegal Operation" and the program would close. It never happened immediately with a file but happened after one or two closings. In addition, I couldn't merge layers after this "Illegal Operation" happened once. Since the hardware of all three machines was different, the only common denominator was other software that I had on the machine. I do not know if this problem occurred because of a software conflict on my machine or a flaw in the program.

The support for Right Hemisphere's programs is e-mail tech support or, now, a new support forum which looks interesting.

In conclusion, I hope that my experience with tech support was an anomaly and that the problem I had was due to a software conflict on my machines. Both Deep Paint 3D and Texture Weapons are very powerful programs and even with the "problem" I really enjoyed using them.

According to Right Hemisphere's newsletter, during the first quarter of 2002, they will be introducing Deep Paint 3D and Texture Weapons version 2.