zbrush's polypaint vs 3dc's voxel paint

noface789

As a beginner learning texturing I've been doing some research to see which software I should start learning. I narrowed it down to these 2 and would like your input for those artists who have used either or both of these tools. Which do you think is better? I can't find any documentation on 3dc's voxel paint so I can't analyze it myself. Also are there any other programs that can do what Zbrush does as far as texturing goes? I.E 3d paint -> export to UV with no wrapping. Afaik Zbrush and maybe 3dc are the only ones that can.

JedTheKrampus

Anything that can paint Ptex textures doesn't need UVs at the start. 3D Coat and Mari are the best all-around options for texturing like this.

Painting vertices like this in Zbrush and 3D Coat can be a good way to work if you don't need quite as much texel density. You need a looooot of points in Zbrush to get a really high-quality texture.

noface789

Ah, so that's what it's called. I spent all day digging up stuff on 3dc's voxel/vertex painting functions and have found very little, searching ptex yields more info, thanks. And the vertex density being tied to texture resolution in Zbrush was another thing I was considering. I have read that 3DC is a bit "better" at painting then Zbrush in some ways including this particular situation. But after some research I think I might try using both programs like how some people are using Zbrush to lay down their base colors and exporting the UV to polypaint for the more detailed work.

Internet Friend

3D Coat has a lot more flexibility in how you texture. You can vertex paint, ptex, UV and paint, or some combination within the same program. You also get much better manual retopo and UV tools with the package, though ZRemesher the far faster automatic topo tool.

One of my favorite features of 3D Coat's texturing tools is the ability to accurately lay down splines on a surface and then stroke or extrude along them, rather than use ZBrush's fiddly wiggly Curves feature.

noface789

Internet Friend said:

One of my favorite features of 3D Coat's texturing tools is the ability to accurately lay down splines on a surface and then stroke or extrude along them, rather than use ZBrush's fiddly wiggly Curves feature.

Yeah that was one of the things I liked more about 3DC was that for some of its automated features, the preliminary work like laying down guides before retopping seemed more intuitive than Zbrush. The modeling capabilities between the 2 softwares has me indecisive, they both seem capable but I'm left wondering if 3dc has as vast a toolset as Zbrush.

Either I can continue with my originally planned workflow of doing base work in Zbrush and refining work in 3DC, or I could just work mostly in 3DC. I'm leaning towards the former since, as a beginner, documentation is valuable to me. It seems like 3DC's documentation isn't as thorough, nor is there enough information on 3DC than there is Zbrush since I assume is because Zbrush has been established as one of the premier 3d applications for a while. 

JedTheKrampus

I personally find 3D Coat's painting workflow to be pretty straightforward if you've ever painted in Photoshop or Krita or something like that. The roughness/metallic blending modes are a bit tough to get used to as well as the masks system but basically you just have to paint the texture.