Painting textures with image editors?

Hello there! I was working on a previous project and I found the blender painting tools to be sort of limiting to the way I paint textures, and as a result I spent most of my time switching in between applications and not as much time actually painting. I’m wondering if there is some sort of external program or plugin for blender, that allows quick exporting back and forth to PS or GIMP. Something perhaps similar to ZappLink, only I don’t want to have to use Zbrush, because the conversion from polypainting to textures is both tedious and often inaccurate. I’d much rather paint directly onto the image like in blender texture paint mode. Some of you may say, “Why no just paint on the texture (with the UV layout) in PS” which is reasonable, but then I have to save out a separate png/tga (I can’t get blender to recognize .psd), reload the image in blender, and check the result. I’d rather have a sort of projection painting style, though the conventional stencil method with blender would also be very time consuming.

So basically, how would one go about projection painting a blender model with Photoshop using a nice fast workflow, with either an external program or a blender plugin?

Thanks! :slight_smile:

http://www.blendtuts.com/quick_projection

Thanks Pyro and Robi! That’s exactly what I was looking for. I didn’t even know blender had that feature! :smiley:

@Craig, I did try installing that plugin previously, but I don’t think it’s compatible with the latest version of blender because I couldn’t find the option to enable it.

Um, I am using it right now. It might be that you have to look all the way down on the bottom right of the N panel, and it only appears when you enter Texture Paint mode. I know, I had originally thought there was something wrong until I reread the part that said ‘enter tex paint mode’. It works well for me here, and I am on official 2.65 release.