3ds max 8 to paint textures?

Is there some sort of plug-in (preferrably free!) for 3ds max 8 that can allow you to paint textures onto a mesh?

Not really. Most of the painting tools are vertex coloring tools. I usually lay out all my UV's in max and then do all my texture painting in PS and ZBrush.

Try tattoo,... 3d paint written in blitz.
http://www.terabit-software.co.uk/

tattoo doesn't paint textures though, does it.

Yes it does. What did you think it did?

I only saw it paint rgb's...

What are rgbs?! It paints with photoshop style brushes.

rgb's = red blue green's = colored pixels.

And colored pixels are not textures?

Seriously, there are 3 ways to color objects that I can think of.

1. Object (entity) color
2. Vertex Colors
3. Texture Maps

What are you referring too? I've been doing this for 20 years and I have no idea what you are referring to. Colors use RGB values of course, but that applies to all methods.

I was talking about picking a texture file (bmp, tga, jpg, etc.) and painting that directly onto a mesh, like how maya does it.

Oh,... so you are not talking about painting on a mesh at all. You just want to apply a texture that has been already made?

Look in the Max help at the material editor, and possibly UV coordinates if you don't already have them on your mesh.

no, like taking a brush and painting a texture onto it...(click and drag on a mesh, the projected mesh area has that texture placed to it)

Ahh. Take a look at the polyboost plug-in. Lots of poly modelling stuff in there, and some good texture painting tools also.

http://www.polyboost.com/

awesome, thanks

dang, It's not free...any freeware lol?