I just finished painting the ceilings in 3 rooms of a rental property that I own.
At your local humongous home store, you can buy behr textured ceiling paint (i think they advertise popcorn finish) I bought the fancy roller that the sales guy recommended for textured paint. However when I started, I found the textured roller put too much stuff in too small an area. So I switched to the cheapo rollers that I was using for the walls.
The cheap rollers are better in my opinion, the texture effect is more subtle that the special roller, but the stuff is applied evenly and looks fine. I had patched a few small cracks, and rolled right over them with the textured paint and it looks great.
I did do one small room with the special roller, and now that it has dried, I can see that there is too much material and it is started to crack.
To sum up:
- Beher textured ceiling paint w/ popcorn
- regular roller
- all done