Dylan: You dont need to unwrap the highpoly meshes. 3D Coat can use Ptex for hires stuff. You can pop a sculpt straight out of zbrush with no uv's and PBR paint it in 3DC.
I use it to bake and see AO on my HP meshes all the time.
You can lock a layer's opacity and use one layer's opacity as a clipping mask for another layer. It's not really photoshop style but IMO it's quite adequate.
Another question I have is does 3D coat support photoshop style layer masking yet? I could really use it.
Sort of, you can use paint layers as a mask (Freeze) and it will stick until you clear it. So you can have layers that you can use as a mask or just generate a mask from an existing layer. It will always be there as long as you still have the layer itself to generate a mask from.
Both of those methods mentioned are silly workarounds that take as long or longer than my current process. I want something that works in both programs the exact same so I can just grab and drag a layer in photoshop with the mask. Or transfer my mask in photoshop into 3D coat with no effort.
Both of those methods mentioned are silly workarounds that take as long or longer than my current process. I want something that works in both programs the exact same so I can just grab and drag a layer in photoshop with the mask. Or transfer my mask in photoshop into 3D coat with no effort.
... silly workarounds?
Photoshop, make mask its own layer. Export PSD
3DC, Import PSD, click on layer you want to be a mask.. select Freeze Painted pixels.
Once done with mask, unfreeze it and click eye on layer to hide it.
Done.
Not that silly of a work around.
ALSO.... You can send your paint job over to photoshop or krita through its "Send to external editor" function. There you can use photoshop and send it right back to 3D Coat.
Sure it would be nice if it was exactly like Photoshop, but the functionality is there...just a bit different. What else can you do? Its not like you have a lot of alternative options that use PS masks natively.
Well problem is even with that if I transfer the mask from photoshop to 3D coat I have to go and make the mask into a visible layer because 3d coat doesn't read masks and then do all the conversion. And because I often switch between programs and are constantly bringing files into my photoshop psd because 3d coat doesn't recognize half the layers I work with. And besides that, 3d coat crashes when I look at it funny. Most often when I do a simple thing like undo. So I like to keep most of my work in photoshop. It's not convenient to have to rebuild masks all the time.
I think brush engine is much better and smoother in coat. To me it feels like photoshop. I've heard painter use some kind of vector engine under the hood and it really shows up if you try to paint something more complicated than a mask for a substance material.
I was disappointed when I had first tried it.
The layer system with masks and fill layers is better in painter though.
That painting capability looks so sweet... any one experienced with 3D-Coat can give a short review VS Substance Painter, please?
Think of Substance Painter using vectors to mask out where the materials will appear. Its not paintercentric, but more fill material centric.
3DC is the opposite. You paint like its mudbox, photoshop...ect its very bitmap oriented. There is no real scalability. You paint on a certain resolution thats what you get. Smart materials are a combination of texture input and settings. You can actually blur/blend materials.
In my opinion a lot of painter stuff starts looking the same, 3DC allows for far more variety in terms of art style.
Is the version on Steam up to date? It only says 4, and the patch notes are extremely outdated.
Dataday already pointed at it. Nope. It's 4.0. What you get at Steam though is also the serial. And with that serial you can download and use the 4.5 version then. Curious enough, the discount price at the 3D Coat page is much higher than the current price at Steam ...
Dataday already pointed at it. Nope. It's 4.0. What you get at Steam though is also the serial. And with that serial you can download and use the 4.5 version then. Curious enough, the discount price at the 3D Coat page is much higher than the current price at Steam ...
It's been a while, but as far as i remember you don't have to be online. But you have to start the steam client. That's why i have downloaded the original version then.
It is a "super important change" that is not important enough to get a description like the other changes? Just showing the images alone creates skepticism and lacks clarity. My first reaction to it is "no, why?" but if there was a description, i would understand.
It's difficult to explain, but painting with a hard round brush feels much more like Photoshop now. With previous versions, even with a hard-edged alpha brush strokes were always slightly blurry at the edges. It also looks like "opacity" is acting more like opacity in photoshop, and not flow. I'd still really like to see a separate flow option in 3d Coat.
Interesting, I wonder when the exact time the update occurred on steam. Its also weird that they havent announced it or updated the initial v4 number on the page.
In regards to masks; Apparently work is being done to implement Photoshop-style masking in 3DC, so its coming...eventually. The PBR work has taken quite some time but originally it was supposed to be implemented right after radial symmetry was, so hopefully with 4.5 being officially released it's not too far off.
You can paint on color, roughness, bump, and metallic channels all at once and adjust them each quite easily. You don't have to faff about with setting the shader up either. If you need to paint absurdly high-res stuff Mari is still your best bet, of course, although you can easily use the external editor projection feature to really get however much detail it is that you need.
Regarding paining straight on high-res models using Ptex : has anyone tried it and got good results out of it ? On my end it seemed to work at first, but after inspection the smart materials did not seem to pick up surface and edge information, which causes paint chipping and edge weathering to not appear.
[edit] Rectificaiton on this : it seems to work, just not quite as obvisouly as with regular continuous normalmapped models but that's probably to be expected.
On the topic of layer masking : as mentionned by Jed above it is indeed possible through clipping. Basically, one can import a PSD with "masks" split over multiple layers to use these layers in 3Dcoat as clipping masks. These proxy layers can very well be set to invisible as this doesn't negatively impact clipping behavior. That being said, this is still one level of magnitude less powerful than the advanced layer masking options that Substance Painter offers.
I think brush engine is much better and smoother in coat. To me it feels like photoshop. I've heard painter use some kind of vector engine under the hood and it really shows up if you try to paint something more complicated than a mask for a substance material.
Just chiming in to correct this. Substance Painter does not use a vector engine for painting. And the way the strokes are saved has no effect at all on how the painting itself feels.
Just chiming in to correct this. Substance Painter does not use a vector engine for painting. And the way the strokes are saved has no effect at all on how the painting itself feels.
I was also under the impression that Painter uses a vector like painting approach (which allows for scalability) which masks out where the substance data will be seen. I believe it was during one of the twitch broadcasts that the vector comment was made.
Regardless, I was kind of hoping Painter would feel more like 3DC in terms of painting.. but its quite far from that feel. If painter could improve upon its brush engine, and add some of the usual features used with painting (blending with shift for example) as well as a dockable color picker... I think it would start to feel more like a painting focused application.
Regarding paining straight on high-res models using Ptex : has anyone tried it and got good results out of it ? On my end it seemed to work at first, but after inspection the smart materials did not seem to pick up surface and edge information, which causes paint chipping and edge weathering to not appear.
[edit] Rectificaiton on this : it seems to work, just not quite as obvisouly as with regular continuous normalmapped models but that's probably to be expected.
Yeah I spent most of sunday trying to figure out PTEX in 3DCoat.
my expirience so far is that its not suited very well to hardsurface/sub-d models, its mostly intended for organic models (this was said in a video I watched) and whenever I used it on my meshes I kept getting crazy stretching and inconsistent texture resolution.
I had another issue that when it would bake the curvature map for using in the brushes (to do edge wear etc) the masking was extreemly thin and didnt have a thick enough edge to get ideal results.
Still something im curious about but certainly not the miracle solution to texturing I thought it could be :P
Also, to follow up on my first post, I figured out that robot in the video is actually a normal mapped lowpoly, its just a REALLY good bake
so I think this painting works best for lowpoly painting with a normal map.
3DCOAAATT 0_0
A few question please. considering grabbing this app.
- Is the license transferable between Steam and the standalone?
- Can I use the same license on 2 PC, at work and at home? They won't be used at the same time.
Can I use the same license on 2 PC, at work and at home? They won't be used at the same time.
yes, if you use at same time it will warn you that you have two iterations open with your license and that you need to close one of them down to use it.
- Is the license transferable between Steam and the standalone?
You can copy your license.dat file over into the correct folder and therefore run the standalone one. Can't remember the exact locations but i've been doing it this way for a while now. It was actually suggested on the 3D Coat forums by one of the moderators during beta testing so I don't think the official stance is that there is anything wrong with it.
I finally got around to testing the PBR painting in 3d-coat and I love it. It's pretty quick and I would say I like the feel a lot more vs. Substance Painter.
Dylan: You dont need to unwrap the highpoly meshes. 3D Coat can use Ptex for hires stuff. You can pop a sculpt straight out of zbrush with no uv's and PBR paint it in 3DC.
I use it to bake and see AO on my HP meshes all the time.
Once you've baked AO onto your high poly mesh, how do you then transfer that information to your UV'd low poly?
Now that 3D-Coat has added full PBR support, we worked closely with them to make exporting your projects to Sketchfab as easy as possible.
Their latest version contains a Sketchfab exporter that publishes your project to Sketchfab, sets up all required PBR materials and then enables the PBR renderer. It’s literally one click!
To celebrate this new integration, we’re giving all 3D-Coat users a free 90-day Sketchfab PRO license! Just download 3D-Coat (they have a free 30-day trial), upload a model with their new exporter and the 90 days will be added to your Sketchfab account.
Andrew Shpagin, Lead Programmer and Director of 3D-Coat, says:
3D-Coat 4.5.04 is completely compatible with Sketchfab PBR system! Metalness, and roughness painted in 3D-Coat with smart materials will be correctly shown in Sketchfab. It is the best way to expose or share your textured model.
Material ball in 3D-Coat by 3D-Coat on Sketchfab How did we do this?
Under the hood, here’s how it works: the 3D-Coat Sketchfab exporter creates an archive that contains an OBJ/MTL file and the required textures. The texture filenames follow a syntax that defines the name of the associated material and the mapping type:
export3dcoat_MATERIALNAME_MAPTYPE.tga We use this information to plug the textures maps into the right channels, switch on our PBR rendering mode and even select the correct PBR workflow.
3D-Coat is the first application to get this level of PBR support. The team is very excited to work together with them and to see the stream of beautiful models coming in from their community.
Enjoy!
- Bart
Imo 3d coat could be easily the best texture painting soft if not a few weird limitations
One of them is absence of convenient transform gizmo for projected material painting. It has the gizmo actually but not very helpful since it misses one very important option . You can't set the center of transform in a random corner/place of projected image. Only in the center. That makes precise positioning of specific detail a torture, especially if such detail not in the center of the image.
Imo 3d coat could be easily the best texture painting soft if not a few weird limitations
One of them is absence of convenient transform gizmo for projected material painting. It has the gizmo actually but not very helpful since it misses one very important option . You can't set the center of transform in a random corner/place of projected image. Only in the center. That makes precise positioning of specific detail a torture, especially if such detail not in the center of the image.
Zbrush do it so right.
Yeeeeeees definitely this!
It would be great to have a way to undo changing the view as well, since it's easy to do by accident after aligning a texture source pic, and then it's hard to get it back the exact way it was aligned before.
Important notice! From July 8, 2016 till July 22, 2016 we offer a special launch discount of100 USD on PRO and Floating licenses, and 20 USD on Amateur Enjoy!
KEY NEW FEATURES: - Discover the New Physically Based Shader! - Smart Materials for sculpting shaders introduced; - Bake multiple maps now, including AO, SSS; - Pack multiple channels into one texture with the New Export Constructor! A bunch of presets for Game/Render engines available; - Enjoy Anti-aliased painting everywhere now, including Vertex Painting, PPP, MV and Ptex; - Take advantage of the New low-poly modeling Retopo Tools! - A New selection of Primitives Added: screws, spirals and more; - Export your models 3D-Print-ready now! (3D-Coat PRO only!).
We hope you like the progress 3D-Coat has made lately. Enjoy and have fun with your 3D-Coat!
3D ART CHALLENGE: EXTRA TIME FOR SUBMISSIONS In response to your multiple requests we extend the Official 3D-Coat Challenge by 30 days. Submit your creations by August 10 to win $1000 in our first big Art Challenge! Visit the contest page to find out all the contest details. The Challenge is sponsored by Pilgway and Sketchfab
So much has visibly improved in 4.5 and it seems to be ongoing in 4.7 at the same pace, the changelogs are full of both new features & bugfixes. Stay awesome and rock on, 3D Coat!
Those tools look amazing! I downloaded the Mac build of 4.7.06 yesterday, but I don't see those tools in my retoporoom. Any idea what's going on there?
@ryebot: I think those are still considered 'beta', so you might be able to get access to them by enabling 'Show beta tools' under preferences, on the 'General' tab. Also, @Carlosan, someone alerted me to the fact that the video has been taken down. That can't help with promotion much, so you might want to get that looked at
Model and texture a Fantasy Weapon (This can include a sword, hammer, bow, etc. Anything that could be used as a weapon; be creative!). Use any software to create the 3D model (This can include Maya, 3Ds Max, Modo, blender, etc.). Use 3D Coat to texture your model (This is a requirement for this contest, download a 30 day trial at: http://3dcoat.com/download/). You are only required to make a diffuse texture. You may create normal maps, spec, gloss, use a pbr workflow if you wish, but these are NOT required. Preference will be given to a hand painted style texture. There are no limits on poly count or texture sizes. Use as many polys and textures as you want! Avoid any gore, nudity, and similar extreme and potentially sensitive subjects.
To enter the contest, you must submit the following:
A beauty render/s of your textured model (Include as many images in .jpeg, .png format. Use any software to create your renders). You may include wireframe renders as well. 3D Coat file/s (.3b) (This is to make sure you used 3D coat for at least 80% of your texture work, make sure the file includes your layers). Fill the form below and attach all required files.
Deadline
The last day to submit your work is on December 2, 2016. Submit any time between now and the deadline. There is no limit on the amount of entries per person. Any work submitted after the deadline will not be considered.
The winner will be decided on the following criteria:
Creativity (shows originality, unexpected elements that blend well together, variation, etc.) Execution (shows skill, artistry, etc.)
Winner will receive:
One license of 3D Coat!, provided by the awesome 3D Coat team. There will only be one winner.
Replies
That sounds so ballin.
Im gonna give that a whirl
Sort of, you can use paint layers as a mask (Freeze) and it will stick until you clear it. So you can have layers that you can use as a mask or just generate a mask from an existing layer. It will always be there as long as you still have the layer itself to generate a mask from.
Nope, not yet.
... silly workarounds?
Photoshop, make mask its own layer. Export PSD
3DC, Import PSD, click on layer you want to be a mask.. select Freeze Painted pixels.
Once done with mask, unfreeze it and click eye on layer to hide it.
Done.
Not that silly of a work around.
ALSO.... You can send your paint job over to photoshop or krita through its "Send to external editor" function. There you can use photoshop and send it right back to 3D Coat.
Sure it would be nice if it was exactly like Photoshop, but the functionality is there...just a bit different. What else can you do? Its not like you have a lot of alternative options that use PS masks natively.
That was one impressive promo vid.
I was disappointed when I had first tried it.
The layer system with masks and fill layers is better in painter though.
You can either use ptex or simply paint on mesh itself if it's dense enough.
Vertices keep not only color but also roughness and metalness.
Think of Substance Painter using vectors to mask out where the materials will appear. Its not paintercentric, but more fill material centric.
3DC is the opposite. You paint like its mudbox, photoshop...ect its very bitmap oriented. There is no real scalability. You paint on a certain resolution thats what you get. Smart materials are a combination of texture input and settings. You can actually blur/blend materials.
In my opinion a lot of painter stuff starts looking the same, 3DC allows for far more variety in terms of art style.
My steam version is updated says 4.5.02.
It's been a while, but as far as i remember you don't have to be online. But you have to start the steam client. That's why i have downloaded the original version then.
It's difficult to explain, but painting with a hard round brush feels much more like Photoshop now. With previous versions, even with a hard-edged alpha brush strokes were always slightly blurry at the edges. It also looks like "opacity" is acting more like opacity in photoshop, and not flow. I'd still really like to see a separate flow option in 3d Coat.
Interesting, I wonder when the exact time the update occurred on steam. Its also weird that they havent announced it or updated the initial v4 number on the page.
Anyways if its there, then thats great for all.
[edit] Rectificaiton on this : it seems to work, just not quite as obvisouly as with regular continuous normalmapped models but that's probably to be expected.
On the topic of layer masking : as mentionned by Jed above it is indeed possible through clipping. Basically, one can import a PSD with "masks" split over multiple layers to use these layers in 3Dcoat as clipping masks. These proxy layers can very well be set to invisible as this doesn't negatively impact clipping behavior. That being said, this is still one level of magnitude less powerful than the advanced layer masking options that Substance Painter offers.
I was also under the impression that Painter uses a vector like painting approach (which allows for scalability) which masks out where the substance data will be seen. I believe it was during one of the twitch broadcasts that the vector comment was made.
Regardless, I was kind of hoping Painter would feel more like 3DC in terms of painting.. but its quite far from that feel. If painter could improve upon its brush engine, and add some of the usual features used with painting (blending with shift for example) as well as a dockable color picker... I think it would start to feel more like a painting focused application.
I'm freelancing and all the clients want PSDs
my expirience so far is that its not suited very well to hardsurface/sub-d models, its mostly intended for organic models (this was said in a video I watched) and whenever I used it on my meshes I kept getting crazy stretching and inconsistent texture resolution.
I had another issue that when it would bake the curvature map for using in the brushes (to do edge wear etc) the masking was extreemly thin and didnt have a thick enough edge to get ideal results.
Still something im curious about but certainly not the miracle solution to texturing I thought it could be :P
Also, to follow up on my first post, I figured out that robot in the video is actually a normal mapped lowpoly, its just a REALLY good bake
so I think this painting works best for lowpoly painting with a normal map.
3DCOAAATT 0_0
- Is the license transferable between Steam and the standalone?
- Can I use the same license on 2 PC, at work and at home? They won't be used at the same time.
yes, if you use at same time it will warn you that you have two iterations open with your license and that you need to close one of them down to use it.
You can copy your license.dat file over into the correct folder and therefore run the standalone one. Can't remember the exact locations but i've been doing it this way for a while now. It was actually suggested on the 3D Coat forums by one of the moderators during beta testing so I don't think the official stance is that there is anything wrong with it.
Once you've baked AO onto your high poly mesh, how do you then transfer that information to your UV'd low poly?
Now that 3D-Coat has added full PBR support, we worked closely with them to make exporting your projects to Sketchfab as easy as possible.
Their latest version contains a Sketchfab exporter that publishes your project to Sketchfab, sets up all required PBR materials and then enables the PBR renderer. It’s literally one click!
To celebrate this new integration, we’re giving all 3D-Coat users a free 90-day Sketchfab PRO license! Just download 3D-Coat (they have a free 30-day trial), upload a model with their new exporter and the 90 days will be added to your Sketchfab account.
Andrew Shpagin, Lead Programmer and Director of 3D-Coat, says:
Material ball in 3D-Coat by 3D-Coat on Sketchfab
How did we do this?
Under the hood, here’s how it works: the 3D-Coat Sketchfab exporter creates an archive that contains an OBJ/MTL file and the required textures. The texture filenames follow a syntax that defines the name of the associated material and the mapping type:
export3dcoat_MATERIALNAME_MAPTYPE.tga We use this information to plug the textures maps into the right channels, switch on our PBR rendering mode and even select the correct PBR workflow.
3D-Coat is the first application to get this level of PBR support. The team is very excited to work together with them and to see the stream of beautiful models coming in from their community.
Enjoy!
- Bart
One of them is absence of convenient transform gizmo for projected material painting. It has the gizmo actually but not very helpful since it misses one very important option . You can't set the center of transform in a random corner/place of projected image. Only in the center. That makes precise positioning of specific detail a torture, especially if such detail not in the center of the image.
Zbrush do it so right.
Yeeeeeees definitely this!
It would be great to have a way to undo changing the view as well, since it's easy to do by accident after aligning a texture source pic, and then it's hard to get it back the exact way it was aligned before.
We encourage you to discuss your thoughts and contest-related matters in this thread.
THEME: Steampunk Vehicle
TERMS: May 10- July 10, 2016
PRIZE POOL:
1st place – $1000 + 3D-Coat Professional
2nd place – $500 + 3D-Coat Professional
3rd place – 3D-Coat Professional
http://3dcoat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19259&hl=
Hoping Andrew continues to improve upon the sculpting workflow/brush engine, its one of its best features.
Pilgway Studio is glad to announce 3D-Coat 4.7 is officially released and available for download now!
http://3dcoat.com/download/
Important notice!
From July 8, 2016 till July 22, 2016 we offer a special launch discount of100 USD on PRO and Floating licenses, and 20 USD on Amateur
Enjoy!
KEY NEW FEATURES:
- Discover the New Physically Based Shader!
- Smart Materials for sculpting shaders introduced;
- Bake multiple maps now, including AO, SSS;
- Pack multiple channels into one texture with the New Export Constructor! A bunch of presets for Game/Render engines available;
- Enjoy Anti-aliased painting everywhere now, including Vertex Painting, PPP, MV and Ptex;
- Take advantage of the New low-poly modeling Retopo Tools!
- A New selection of Primitives Added: screws, spirals and more;
- Export your models 3D-Print-ready now! (3D-Coat PRO only!).
Read full features list
http://3dcoat.com/v47/
We have included a 3D-Coat 4.7 features video for you below:
We hope you like the progress 3D-Coat has made lately. Enjoy and have fun with your 3D-Coat!
3D ART CHALLENGE: EXTRA TIME FOR SUBMISSIONS
In response to your multiple requests we extend the Official 3D-Coat Challenge by 30 days. Submit your creations by August 10 to win $1000 in our first big Art Challenge!
Visit the contest page to find out all the contest details.
The Challenge is sponsored by Pilgway and Sketchfab
http://3dcoat.com/community/contest/
Thanks for your time!
Best wishes,
3D-Coat Team
- Quad Strip
- Spline Quad Paint
Also, @Carlosan, someone alerted me to the fact that the video has been taken down. That can't help with promotion much, so you might want to get that looked at
Contest rules:
Model and texture a Fantasy Weapon (This can include a sword, hammer, bow, etc. Anything that could be used as a weapon; be creative!).
Use any software to create the 3D model (This can include Maya, 3Ds Max, Modo, blender, etc.).
Use 3D Coat to texture your model (This is a requirement for this contest, download a 30 day trial at: http://3dcoat.com/download/). You are only required to make a diffuse texture. You may create normal maps, spec, gloss, use a pbr workflow if you wish, but these are NOT required. Preference will be given to a hand painted style texture.
There are no limits on poly count or texture sizes. Use as many polys and textures as you want!
Avoid any gore, nudity, and similar extreme and potentially sensitive subjects.
To enter the contest, you must submit the following:
A beauty render/s of your textured model (Include as many images in .jpeg, .png format. Use any software to create your renders). You may include wireframe renders as well.
3D Coat file/s (.3b) (This is to make sure you used 3D coat for at least 80% of your texture work, make sure the file includes your layers).
Fill the form below and attach all required files.
Deadline
The last day to submit your work is on December 2, 2016. Submit any time between now and the deadline. There is no limit on the amount of entries per person. Any work submitted after the deadline will not be considered.
The winner will be decided on the following criteria:
Creativity (shows originality, unexpected elements that blend well together, variation, etc.)
Execution (shows skill, artistry, etc.)
Winner will receive:
One license of 3D Coat!, provided by the awesome 3D Coat team. There will only be one winner.