MeshPaint 1.0

Value:  Setup:  Features:  Quality:  Support:  Overall:  Meshpaint is a feature rich, easy to use Lightwave3D cloning and hair solution. You want an alien battle fleet of perspective petrifying proportions? You require a forest Shrek would be proud of? How about that bald bathing beauty you've just modelled? Don't you want to give her the Vidal Sassoon look? Well you can do all this now with Meshpaint. The flexibility of Meshpaint is astonishing. Objects cloned in other packages often betray their clone status in being too similar to each other. Not so with Meshpaint, as one can vary the clones by surface attributes, scale, rotation, position and even by which base mesh is chosen to be cloned, all parameters being modifiable by absolute values, enveloped values and even by applying a texture to the parameter. Anyone familiar with the surface editor in Lightwave can begin to imagine the versatility this offers! Image maps with all the usual projection types, including UV; all the procedural textures; and gradients with 24 input parameter options can all be harnessed to give your clones all the variety your imagination can cope with. In practical terms this means that you can distribute your clones across a terrain, or scalp, inheriting the surface parameters of that land or skin. Graduated, deciduous woodland can be automatically applied to a mountain slope, with spruce and larch near the top and oak and beech in the valleys by using a gradient with height or weight map input. With the same simple technique the spotted leopard you've made for the Jumanji remake can take its fur colour directly from the skin's UV mapped texture file, with no extra effort from you. Powerful advantages to using Meshpaint for fur and hair can be seen in the renders, where the fur/hair being poligonal is naturally seen by the camera and included in raytrace calculations: it casts shadows and shows in reflections, accommodates refraction and deals with transparency, all with very little render time overhead. In addition to the main Meshpaint plugin the software comes with two complementary plugins. Designed for easy hair and fur styling, the curve editing tool with its twenty envelopable, texture editable parameters, including kinking, twirling, clumping and gravity is fast and simple to use. The other plugin is a UV editing tool that will redistribute each clone's UVs to unique coordinates, or to save space can do the same with grouped clones. Very useful! With all of Lightwave's surfacing parameters available to influence the look of your clones; and with the powerful curve editing tool working in tandem with Lightwave physics to make dynamics calculated animations you can easily make beautiful, realistic hair and fur, feathers and forests blowing in the wind, all rendered in a fraction of the expected time. All in all, this software is enormously useful and versatile, ergonomically combining the functionality of cloning software and fur/hair plugins at a modest price. This reviewer's one complaint is that Meshpaint is stopping me from sleeping, as I'm having too much fun playing with it and exploring its depths! Reviewed on June 7, 2004 by Rory Little (cix14000@...).