Texture painting on 3D models ?

motorsep

I am looking into getting a 3D app that does excellent job at offering wide variety of tools to an artist for painting textures directly on 3D models (low- to med- polycount, UV mapped models).

I am specifically looking for an app that allows using curves over 3D model and painting strokes using curves as guides. Nice smooth AA'ed strokes, whether using solid brush color or textured brush or stamps.

I've read that ZBrush only offers polypaint (which sounds like vertex paint). I couldn't find much info on 3D Coat about texture painting. The only apps I've seen capable of using curves as guides are Mudbox and Blender's GSoC Paint branch. Blender's strokes over guiding curves are pretty bad (not smooth, not AA'ed) and while I would definitely prefer Blender since that's what I use for 3D work, quality isn't there yet (and there is no saying if that aspect will be improved any time soon).

I've read a few threads "Mudbox vs ZBrush" and based on it seems like Mudbox is a horrible overpriced sculpting app that AD is about to ditch soon. I am hoping that it's not true at all. Just don't feel like forking over $800 for an app that will die rather soon, like Softimage did.

Anyhow, I am open for suggestions. Thanks.

Eric Chadwick

Good luck!

Have you tried d/l demos and trying them out?

ZBrush doesn't have a demo, but yes it is basically vertex color painting, so you do need a tesselated model. However you could subdivide without SMT, paint, then bake back down to your low-res source.

Bodypaint might offer curves.

Photoshop does, but the 3d paint is pretty poor.

Meloncov

It's expensive, but Mari is definitely the most robust set of 3d painting tools you're going to find.

unit187

I don't know about curves, but for low and mid poly 3d painting 3dcoat is the most robust tool I've used. I mean, Mari is awesome and all but the app is huge, afaik it is designed for texturing film assets with 8k+ textures. It is really overkill for game models. And price is big too.
Zbrush is vertex painting tool and I find it unaccaptable when I have to use mega high poly model just to texture my 1000 triangles model. It might become way too highpoly to run smoothly.
Mudbox seemed like nice app, it also has very intuitive interface for autodesk users, but it has a lot of bugs and glitches and I just don't see it in production with all those problems that can easily cost you whole day to solve, if you can solve it at all.
On other hand 3dcoat works like magic and I've chosen it as my 3d painting tool.

motorsep

Thanks guys, but curves as guides is a must-have feature.

JedTheKrampus

ZBrush lets you put a curve on a mesh and use that to make a stroke. But you can't move the curve around like you might expect to be able to; when you move a curve in ZBrush it moves around like a wet noodle. Which might be what you want, but I doubt it.

You can paint with a more traditional spline as a guide in 3D-Coat.

So maybe you should go give that a try. It's pretty cheap too as these packages go.

motorsep

@JedTheKrampus: Can you wrap spline in 3D space around a mesh (snapping to the surface of the mesh) in 3D-Coat ? (I see how it works on a flat plane, which is cool, but not useful for my purposes)

davidmlally

Substance Painter has released a Beta on Valve's Steam service. I hear it's pretty good, but I haven't had a chance to use it myself yet. Also, it's in Beta, so I guess we can take that as a warning.

JedTheKrampus

Looks like it.

motorsep

@davidmlally: I think, from what I saw on YouTube, Substance Painter is great for photo realistic texturing and aging surfaces. I wonder if I can use it for NPR texture that need aging and still have it looking NPR.. Gotta give it a try if it has a demo (unless beta on Steam is free )

@JedTheKrampus: Oh, sweet. I went on their website and checked out PDF. It seems like curve/spline painting is pretty robust.

Thanks guys. I will give 3D-Coat and Mudbox a spin and see which one feels better. It seems that those 2 are the only programs on the market below $1000 that have the tools I need.

Bek

Substance Painter has a free trial from the Allegorithmic website. The steam beta will give access to the v1 so it isn't free (but it is on sale).

http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-painter

Jeff Parrott

I'm all about 3D Coat for 3D painting (definitely for diffuse/spec). If you're doing normals, PBR, etc Substance Painter is the way to go.