Some questions regarding tools and workflows

[Anonymous]

Hey guys I'm a programmer and I am looking at new tools for us to use for texture painting on models. A strong candidate is Mudbox being the licence is so cheap, some concerns for the artists moving over from Photoshop (yes we're currently modeling in Maya and texturing in PS) our models are semi realistic. So the questions: 

1. There seems to be a little bit of some confusion, (some people say some things while others say different) when it comes to being able to paint in the 2D view. Is this possible? 
2. Are you able to select / export poly groups for faces? eg, show / hide groups of faces / layers for Artists to paint on?
3. Would you say that Mudbox is a good tool for texture painting on 3D models?
4. When you moved over from Mudbox was there any hurdles you had to take and how long would you say it took you to move over to the same speed as working in say something like photoshop. 

[imre.major · Accepted solution]

1. For painting in UV space there is a workaround. You can turn the mesh into flattened (basically vertex positions will be replaced by UV). This is still a 3d mesh in the 3d scene, you can rotate the camera etc.. But you can paint on this. Disadvantage is that you can only paint on the areas which is actually used by the mesh, so if you want to paint unused areas of the texture this is not good. You can switch between the flattened and unflattened version of the mesh back and forth.

2. Yes

[Anonymous]

Perfect thank you so much, I knew there was something I could do for a workaround for the 2D view.

One last thing, I'm unsure how I am able to mask out the selected faces, do you know the process? I've googled it but the closest I have found was just selecting faces. 

[imre.major]

What do you mean by mask out? Do you want to hide some faces?

[Anonymous]

Hide / select / paint only on selection, yes. 

[imre.major]

There is a select tool which allows you to select any faces, then pressing the 'h' hotkey will hide those faces. I'm not sure if there is a way to prevent the paint tools affecting some specific faces, but you can have a mask for each paint layer which shows on which area should be paint layer be visible. So if you don't want the paint brush to affect a certain area, you can mask that. Note that this won't prevent the paint brush to affect the texture, it will only hide the paint layer at that area.

[Christoph_Schaedl]

just play with the trial... you learn mudbox in 15minutes...

we paint everything in mudbox... no PS at all...

[Anonymous]

"just play with the trial... you learn mudbox in 15minutes... " Like I've said I am a programmer, thanks for the suggestion though. 

[Christoph_Schaedl]

you have two eyes and two hands... try it... its fun..