What makes 3D Coat a preferred choice for hand-painted texturing?
polycounter lvl 9
I've only used 3D coat for retopology purposes and I was wondering if the experienced folk around here could share what makes 3D Coat such a powerful tool for hand-painted texturing. Doesn't Substance Painter offer as much options for this type of texture work?
Replies
"Doesn't Substance Painter offer as much options for this type of texture work?"
Well ... what exactly makes you think that it does ? Just because it has "paint" in its name doesn't mean that it's good at hand"paint"ing textures.
I's say go ahead and compare both ...
Hand paint is what the artist does, not the software.
No, Substance Painter offer less options for hand painting. For example in 3d coat you can Shift select several brush dabs and paint them randomly/ alternatively . 3dcoat also has a kind of "roll" brush that could use long picture that you can roll along brush stroke , like Zbrush. It also have a spline tool you can draw along perfectly. Projectile painting is also more convenient in 3d coat.
What 3d coat is lacking is fully non-destructive approach with anchor points Painter is capable for. Layer or node system is a pain in your a..
Neither of them is convenient although. Both a creation of mad scientists.
A better name for substance painter would substance material applier. That's what it is strong at. Painting not so much.
It is doable, but classic hand painting is really not its strong side
Iirc 3dCoats Photoshop link supports sending back and forth camera projection while keeping layers (with some caveats probably). I imagine people who are at home in photoshop (use custom brushes) might like this.
i guess you could turn any 2d paint software into a somewhat viable 3d painter using the auto-import ability of marmoset toolbag?
You can use photoshop or w/e you like to work on top of an image of the uv layout, quick export, and then on other screen its going to update immediately in marmoset.
Its not so great if you have to hide seams because you are painting restricted to 2d space, but probably for a lot of models if you had some specialized painting software you like, this might be viable. Something I'll try with artrage at some point because it gives such a great oil painting look with no effort.
And this applier is convenient only when it's your own materials and you know how they work, what's the math behind them and what all the tweaks do exactly . Otherwize it's a huge undeciferable mess of sliders you would spend forever to move around doing miss an hit and it's never what you need so the actual painting is just a way to fix that mess.
To me substance has a more "industrial" approach of art tools like, enabling an "artist" to repeat easily the same task over and over again in a big production pipeline. Don't get me wrong, of course I know there's also a lot of handpainters that loves the substance toolset.
But when 3DCoat has a more "artistic tools", which offers user to really express the way he wants, getting quite rid of the mess of a pile of unstable layers to just apply one color and instead, offering the right tool to just, well, paint the material you want per stroke. Like if you want, you can do the whole texturing job in a single layer, it's okay. Or use tons of them, it's up to you and you can kinda articulate your workflow to the non-destructive level you need (I, for example, don't need to have a non-destructive armor metal surface, but I need to be able to paint several clans warpaints over it and benefit of pretty basic features like curvature, AO, or even use these with custom textures to get a precise style I love to work with). At some point it offers way more freedom, but this goes with the risk to loose continuity over a bunch of artists if they don't follow a precise guideline and/or don't have a good trained eye, while again, substance gives you few tools, already made materials, you just apply and it's good enough most of the time.
(I personnally love using 3DCoat when it comes to texturing, I've only used substance painter when production required it at all costs and it was never a good moment haha, so I guess my opinion may be oriented towards 3DCoat a bit much)