substance painter vs 3d coat and Hand Painted Texturing
polycounter lvl 8
Hi! I know 3D coat is commonly used for Hand Painted texturing, but is Substance Painter also? Are the same results possible?
Your thoughts? Thanks!
Your thoughts? Thanks!
Replies
So if your intent is to create handpainted textures and if you have to chose between 3DC or SP, the answer is definitely 3DCoat.
Both programs have demos so you can judge for yourself. Now one thing of note is that if your need is pure handpainting and if don't mind the lack of layers, Blender is free and perfectly capable of it too (and allows for reprojection from Photoshop, just like 3DC). However it comes with a much steeper learning curve, whereas with 3DCoat you'll be up and running in about a day.
But then he never did.
When it comes to PBR texturing, I see the advantages to working in Substance Painter, but for stylised, painterly texturing there really is no competition, 3dCoat is the king. Luckily, it's no slouch for PBR texturing either, so I get to use it for both and don't have to switch texturing software per project.
Now quite a few programs can do it (3DCoat, Mudbox, Bodypaint, Blender, and Zbrush too to an extent) but afaik Substance Painter doesn't have anything like that.
That's amazing!, do you do any tutorials?
Mari Indie (http://store.steampowered.com/app/433930/ ) is also a good option for hand painted texturing (especially if you cant afford 3D Coat), however it is not nearly as easy to use as something like 3D Coat (learning curve), which is the champion application for painting based workflows in my opinion.
Regarding the feature to export into 2D painting applications found in 3D Coat. Essentially you tell 3D Coat where the external editor is you want to use (via properties). Following that, you can send the paint job over to the editor you picked, save and then it goes right back to 3D Coat with the changes.
For the hand painted stuff, I prefer using Krita as the external editor, its a free application as well so its worth trying out (https://krita.org/en/features/highlights/ )
You can also get the educational version of 3D Coat on steam for $99, however there are some limitations. Layer count limits and such.
Let me add, it really depends on what you mean when you say stylized. Old school hand painted stuff? Definately. Stylized like Fortnite? You'll be putting most of the "hand painting" into the sculpt and not too much into the texture, so you can texture stuff like that in substance as well, just go easy on all the procedural damage generators and what-not.
Just about everything you can do in Photoshop form filters to masking to gradients to stencils is available directly in Substance Painter. 3d Coat is good but Substance Painter allows for more freedom for either realistic or stylized art styles. So far, other than the 8K export cap, Substance Painter has been better in my experience than 3D Coat, Mari and Quixel Suite.
I recommend actually trying it and delving into all of it's features before writing it off as a lesser tool.
the interface could do with a clean up as well. this thing needs more palettes open at all times than mari, quite the feat.
most of my experience comes from dealing with versions 1.0 - 1.7 but i did a recent stint with a 2.x demo and found all my pet peeves were still in there.
btw, mudbox is my tool of choice. could do with a PBR viewport but it's less of a priority than being able to paint in style.
1. you can't select a layer and scale /move it
2. brushes are pretty primitive and reveal its robotic artificial nature instantly. Not that Photoshop's ones are much better but still it's a long way to go till Corel Painter brushes (which alco can paint in depth channel there) or even 3d coat ones which allows multiple alternating brush dabs in a stroke and new Affinity Photo ones.
Their brushes are vector based beneath the hud but there is no way to tweak the strokes really.
In my experience anything done In both Substance programs still shows a recognisable sign of artificial procedural nature. It 's especially apparent when you put a photogrammetry captured object next to SP painted one. Imo anything done in SP still needs a few very important subtle final touches in regular soft for manual, hand crafted art with full range of artist friendly tools where you could almost feel things under your fingerprints. So PSD format is an important way to exchange.
ps. BTW Substance Painter still doesn't have a decent projection painting . Precisely projecting a photogrammetry based material is a huge pain in the a.. and nothing comes close to Photoshop there, even Mari.
Yes. To Extend Trial Period please send support-related question to Andrew Shpagin at
support@3dcoat.com
Thx
Mudbox was in the path of becoming a good 3d painting program , without the stroke problems of Substance painter and good projection systems, until Autodesk abandoned it.
Substance Painter is the best in what it does, procedural texturing, but it is an incomplete 3d painting solution. Having said that I understand that for certain pipelines SP could be enough.
If you set things up the right way you can use it to get the hand painted look by building up masked layers of colour but it's not necessarily how people feel comfortable working - particularly if they're exploring ideas etc.
Don't dismiss it "cos pbr" but equally don't expect it to behave like a 3d photoshop because that's not what it's designed for.