WHAT IS TATTOO? Tattoo is a texturing tool designed to assist in the creation of realistic and lifelike textures for 3D models. WHY USE TATTOO? Even with properly set up UV mapping, it is a difficult job to be able to create a realistic Textured Skin for your 3D models. This is because a 3D skin is created from a 2D image by mapping sets of triangles onto the 2D Texture. Unfortunately it's a very unnatural way of working to have to draw images onto a 2D representation of a 3D object, then 'map' these back onto points. It is a bit like wanting to paint a face onto an Orange, but having to peel the orange first, then paint it, then stick it back together. Tattoo cuts through all of this to allow you to paint directly onto your mesh! HOW DOES IT WORK? When you load a Model into Tattoo it will be displayed in the view window. This model should already have UV co-ordinates assigned from your model creation package or a third party product such as Unwrap3D. For the best results you should also have assigned some textures to the relevant surfaces, these could be blank, but simple base colours are ideal as they make it easier to distinguish areas of the mesh. What 3D File Formats can Tattoo Handle? The model can be in any of the following formats. .B3D Native Blitz3D Format .X Native Direct X Format (Version DX7) .3DS 3D Studio Max .LWO (Native LightWave3D 6.5 and above) .OBJ (Navive Alias Support) File Convertors are also available for: .COB (Native TrueSpace 4.0 and above) From www.terabit.nildram.co.uk/tattoo What 2D Image Formats will Tattoo handle? The textures which are assigned to the model can be in any of the following formats. .PNG Portable Network Graphics .BMP Native Windows Bitmap .TGA Targa TrueVision File .JPG JPEG Compressed .PNG is the preferred file format due to good lossless compression and wide support. If any surfaces on your model do not have textures assigned to them, or are unavailable to be loaded at run time, you will be prompted to either select an alternative texture file or to create one to your specifications. Once loaded you can begin painting directly onto the mesh using a number of options. Why not go to www.terabit.nildram.co.uk/tattoo and try out the demo!