Preferred texturing software: Substance Painter, Mari 3.0, Quixel 2.0 or 3d coat?

jdoublej

I can see on this forum that some threads address the topic of texture painting software, but I haven't seen all the major options compared.  If i'm looking to texture high quality nex gen characters, I'd like people to weigh in on what the best option would be if you have to purchase a single program (of course in conjunction with Photoshop and polypainting from Zbrush).  From what I can tell, the options are Substance Painter, Mari 3.0, Quixel Suite 2.0 and 3d coat.  

Substance painter looks great, but I dont like that you can't paint across multiple uv sets, so cleaning seams can be a pain, I'm not too familiar with the latest Mari, although the old one seems to have less emphasis on PBR than some of the other programs, I'm totally unfamiliar with Quixel suite 2.0, but it seems nice being that you can work from a large library of megascans and your're already in photoshop,...3d coat I've used, but it lacks some of the fancy layer masking and material libraries and brushes are not the best...anyways, I'd love to hear people's opinions.

thanks,

-Josh

ActionDawg

In Substance Painter you can paint in 3D, so seams aren't much of an issue. It also works fantastically with Substance Designer in tandem, allowing you to create custom Substances that you could use exactly like how the Quixel Suite materials function.

Burpee

MARI is probably the best one for hi-rez texturing ( since it's supporting UDIM ), you can really do anything you want with your texture, there's it PLENTY of fractal, random stuff, layer etc but there's not preset like metal / rock etc.. you must create everything by your own.
I'd without any hesitation put in #1 
But you need a good machine to run it otherwise it's worst than anything, also his symmetry function is really crappy, and it's not cheap  

The alternative to MARI is mudbox, very fast, no baking projecting time, support udim, but no funky fractal / layer

Painter & Quixel are very similar for me, working with preset is very kewl, I find Painter more stable and faster than Quixel but Quixel's preset library is kinda awesome, both are very good ! ( both have free trial so you should try by yourself what's suit you best )

3DCoat seams to be great for hand painted stuff, don't know why, I hate it  

And as @somedoggy said you can paint on 3D so seams aren't an issue
Cheers! 

Pizdos

Substance Painter/Designer, better that all others. Quixel is just full of bugs and require Photoshop, and devs do and fix things with drunk snail speed.

huffer

Yeah, Quixel is buggy, but it's so much easier to use and get something nice fast out of it. I don't know much of Painter or Designer, I have no idea how you'd do some simple things like add some text stickers, or import a poster, adjust a bit, mask it, cut it up, etc. Quixel has the advantage of using all of Photoshop's tools, so making adjustments, importing photo-references, etc, is very easy.

oglu

Mudbox here cause i need to paint everything unique. No need for procedural stuff and i have to use UDIMs.
And with the new mudbox to Vray exporter i dont have to bake dispmaps.

thomasp

depends on how you work. not of the "paint it all in 3D" crowd myself i instead prefer to do a good part of the work in 2D and mostly use 3D texturing to build the base and in the end clean it up. i need something simple that i can just dive into and out of all the time, so mudbox is my preference. also, 3D paint with surface tracking and mirror is what i would not want to miss out on, an all projection-centric workflow is really too slow for my taste.

quixel is high on my list of things to check out though for one of these days since having all the familiar photoshop functionality available right there in 3D would be a powerful draw indeed.

jdoublej

Its great to hear everyone's opinion...Of course I have no real verdict, but it does seem that if you choose to go with Quixel or Substance Painter, you wont really go too wrong either way...I actually already own Quixel, but unfortuneatly, i get an error everytime I launch,..so I'll have to get busy trouble shooting it and give it a test run...I like that Substance have a pretty sensible interface and seems powerful in most respects, I'm just not sure how well it will do for very refined texture work...I like the idea that Quixel has a really good library of smart materials,..maybe I'm just lazy,..but for various metals and leathers and such,..I would rather not try and reinvent that stuff if I dont need to...for creature skins and such I'm much more inclined to do a lot of manual painting, so I'm wondering which one will have better brush feel and control in this area....I'd love to hear more opinions in the meantime if anyone has one..

thanks to everyone who replied

Burpee

jdoublej said:

..I actually already own Quixel, but unfortuneatly, i get an error everytime I launch,..so I'll have to get busy trouble shooting it and give it a test run...I

Just try to uncheck " Read only " on Photoshop.exe and Photoshop CC Folder 

gl ! 

2bytes

I need the UDIM support...and now Mari is node based and can support proper networks.  It lacks a shader library for quick turnaround...but its a beast.

gnoop

Imo all  the listed  texture painting soft works well  only for  uniquely UV unwrapped objects   like characters and props.     And works not that good at all for the environment  side of games where materials are tileable, non UV specific  and constructed of several detail layers with different texel size + decals + small geometry instancing.    

 I see no soft that could help to do such tasks easier.   Substance designer shows some promise but I still haven't been  able to use it  beyond subjects looking natively repetitive like ceramic tiles .   Any mother nature stuff  turns  extremely repetitive and unnatural and no high pass helps to fix it .    Weird thing they had a feature that allowed to tweak procedural  fragments manually in their old "Map zone" .  A feature that helped to solve this exact problem   to some extent .

2bytes

Mari and Mudbox can paint on overlapping UVs and have tileable texture workflows, but the workflows you mentioned are centered around UV tricks...something a painting app shouldnt be focused on.