Deep Paint 3D + MAX

#1 I used deep paint 3d briefly at my old place of employment. It was neat, and useful.. but not worth the price. You might want to check out Tattoo.. which has everything needed to get a skin started by painting on the mesh before moving it in to photoshop.

#2 I personally wasnt too impressed with Deep Pain 3D. Its an intersting painting application that is similar to the likes of Photoshop, PSP or Corel Paint but I didn't find anything that was particularily unique to it that would make me want to invest in it over one of the the programs that I just mentioned. Sure its neat to be able to paint on your object in 3D, but after a while I felt that this feature wore thin on me. As for its "unwrapping" ability, I didn't feel that it gave me anything that I couldn't do better on my own with the tools built into my 3D application.

Give it a try though you might find that you like it.

#3 Yeah Tattoo is a cool little blitzbasic app, you need a fairly beefy PC but it does work with a variety of 3D formats. The biggest benefit that Deep paint has is that it can be run from within 3dsmax.

Another 3dsmax plugin tool thats pretty good it Cebas Ghostpainter 2. We prefered that at work, its a plugin for both photoshop and 3dsmax, and lets you paint with photoshop within 3dsmax viewports or photoshop and save out your UV wireframes as a vector lineart layer.

http://www.cebas.com/products/products.php?UD=10-7888-33-788&PID=5

If your looking for something cheap that works, you can't go wrong with tattoo though.