Anyone use 3D coat? Holiday sa…
Daz 3D Forums > General > The Commons>Anyone use 3D coat? Holiday sa…
Anyone use 3D coat? Holiday sale is tempting...
McGyver
Posts: 7,075
in The Commons
I have been eyeing 3D coat for a while, but I really wanted the pro license because of the bigger texture sizes... It's on sale now for $279 USD ($100 off) and that's a doable price. I'm interested in the 3D painting and UV mapping aspects, but everything seems pretty interesting... I'm curious if it lives up to what the videos make it out to be.
Thanks and your input is greatly appreciated.
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I have it and I love it. It is the first 3D painting program that worked with my convoluted brain. Like everything, your mileage may vary, but they do have a trial, and I suggest you give it a go if you are serious about it. The just under $300 price point is very attractive.
I have not used it for UV's yet, but the retopo tools are fairly straightforward, there is a good complement of sculpting tools and live clay, a cloth draping sim, a basic selection of hard surface modeling tools, and a usueable set of tools that let you morph objects without changing vertices. Painting is fun. You can import images to use like a stamp, or set up your own smart materials if you already have the relevant maps.
I've got a tut around here somewhere about usiing Daz figures in 3DCoat, and I'll link it if I can track it down.
Yes thumbs up it's way better than Zbrush for texturing and I use it for most of my Iray materials !
Beware, it wants to phone home at intervals and if it fails to do so it stops working (reason why I didn't buy it in the past).
If it's 3D texture painting you're interested in you really should also consider Allegorithmic's Substance Painter Indy (for those of us not making loads of money using it).
Of course Blender is free and more than capable, but for creating UVs for 'organic stuff' I personally think 3D Coat is absolutely fantastic!
Creating UV maps is what I use it for mostly.
And then there is Voxel, mesh sculpting and retopo tools that can rival ZBrush, without ever having to struggle with ZBrush's awkward interface, with a price tag that is unrivaled for such a complete package.
I wish I would have seen the sale earlier... There are only three days left.
Substance painter Indy seems to be a very fair deal, but one thing I dislike about Algorithmic is they seem to rely a lot on CGI community buzz (perhaps social media) and cool videos to sell their product... When I first came across it, it took about three days to figure out what exactly it was... As far as I know, there is no text anywhere on their site that says "This is what our product is and what it's for" it seems very much set up for someone who already has used something exactly like it... As a matter of fact, since it has been at least a month since I last gawked at their site, I've already forgotten what the main differences between substance painter and designer are. Despite that, Substance Designer is on my wish list... also from what I've figured out, you need good UV maps to get the best out of it... That and I still don't know what the max texture size is for the Indy version.
The 3D painting features of 3D Coat are very interesting and UV mapping has never been a strong point for me, but from what I can tell it seems like 3D Coat automates a few of more tedious parts of it... Also there seems to be that Global Uniform Unwrapping feature, which I'm not sure exactly what it does, but from what I've read in CGI forums, seems to have generated a lot of excitement.
I'm also curious about the Voxel sculpting and if it translates to polygons well... I get what Voxels are... Sorta more akin to cloud points, than polygons if I'm right... But I wonder if I use it to make something, if I'd have to jump through hoops to use it in DAZ/Poser... ?
I doubt I can get the three hundred spendable money before the sale is over. I still have not gotten my W2 from work so I cannot do my taxes yet.
If you make something with voxels you need to send it to the retopo room to make it into a lower polygon mesh. You can then bake the fine details from the voxels to normal maps. There is a manual and auto retopo feature. They should have some videos on their youtube channel which is linked from here http://3dcoat.com/learn/
Ah, I see... You can't just export a Voxel model as an OBJ, it has to be converted to polygons first... I guess unless one is making a model for a game that can use Voxels or for use with a render engine that understands them, they are okay... Otherwise it's extra work, so I suppose it all depends how much you really want to convert a given model to polygons and how well an artist works with the process.
One other question... I can't find the video where I saw it, or the perhaps the point in the video where I saw it, but I got the impression that it sculpts in Quads, as opposed to Tris, like most other sculpting modeling programs?
Thats one of the annoying things for customers... When a site uses videos more than text, it make it hard to find certain info... Text, you just scan the info with your eyeballs until you find the info you are looking for... Video, nine times out of ten, you have to sit through the bulk of it to find what you are looking for... Very tedious.
By the way Kulay Wolf... The Educational version of 3D Coat is currently on sale for $79 (as opposed to $99)... The main difference is no commercial use, you are limited to seven layers and textures are limited to 2048 x 2048... Otherwise it seems every other feature is identical... And I don't think you actually have to be a student to buy it... Not like some software where you have to prove you are enrolled in university... It's more of a hobbyist license.
According to 3d Coat's creator, voxel modeling is for initial rough-shaping, and they only exist in '3d Coat space'. Once you have established a suitably shaped volume using voxels, you're supposed to switch over to surface (= mesh) modeling for adding any kind of detail. This process will always give you a very high density mesh that subsequently needs to be auto-decimated (Tris) OR retopologized (Quads), either automagically or by hand.
With that done you can start creating UV's. A good UV layout is really important for texturing, it pays to spend extra time doing it well.
3d Coat's YouTube channel has excellent tutorials, as does Allegorithmic's, but sitting through enough of them to get you started is anything but fun.
thanks for this info.
The phoning home is not a problem if it is an occasional license check on startup, but if it is required all the time as in constantly while I'm working, then that could be a problem.
I have the educational license on a previous edition, no problems about calling home or anywhere else for that matter ;-)
I did have on an upgrade edition though that had online access as it was apparently confused over which edition/which license of something silly ... so got it working and told it to stop looking for updates tyvm.
As I don't sell can't justify the price tag though I came close one day when I had the full $ in my pocket but they did not answer my simple question in their forums so I walked away ... with the educational license one can NOT do "morphs" ... always tries to lower the polycount a bit on export. As I do hobby morphs this was rather an essential deal point.
However the nice man did say I could use the educational license edition to help with my fanart uvmaps :-)
It makes BEAUTIFUL uvmaps "most of the time" ... and where it misses, could be that it can be done I just haven't figured out how yet ... but Hexagon DOES get some things it cannot do. So keep Hexie in the toolbox ;-) It can select lines from the back faces and through mesh.
As Hexagon tends to fluff up models, 3D makes them [usually] a little smaller and that can be a good thing ... never did notice where or how it does what it does but hay, it works.
Can certainly have fun with that painting page.
And it cuts "stencils" ...
And for those into 3D printing it has geared itself for that as well.
It seems to go on sale at least once a year, some upgrades are free.
By "Fluff up", you mean have a large file size for the same model... Like if you open it in Hex it's 8.5 MB, but in 3D Coat it's 7 or 7.5 MB... Something like that?.... I'm not gonna get rid of Hex anytime soon... Even though I don't really model with it, I use it to fix models when others can't... Especially with welding.
By "Fluff up" I mean that the .obj file exported out of Hexagon might be 8.5 mb.
Import that same 8.5 file into D/S and straight way do an export out of an .obj file and it will be about 5 mb.
Import that 5 mb into Hexagon and it will export it out again as 8.5.
3D Coat might export out the 8.5 less but not as much less as D/S does. Maybe about 7 mb.
But every once in awhile 3D Coat will export out its "medium quality" file even larger so ??? the quiddities of the 3D world.
I noticed that:
So Education + Education To Profesional = $259
$ 279 - $ 259 = $ 20 savings.
Question is, is it allow to purchase both Edu & Edu to Pro?, can't find any restrictions.
Well, for $20 is confusing that license checker of theirs worth it?
The only phoning home I have noticed is the license checking, and occasional notifications of a newer beta version. I have definately used it offline, but not for a period of time over a week, if that makes a difference.
Uncheck export normals before you save the file out of Hex.
okay ... um, but aren't the "normals" just the "face normals" which is actually the mesh that one is wanting?
Same here it checks the first time around then after that it only asks if I want to update so no phone home problems here !
Ditto, no problems here.
As to voxel models, it is the same as any kind of sculpting. It's high poly to create the model with full details. You normally retopologize to create a lower poly model of the high poly and transfer details from the high to low with normals/bump/displacement. 3D Coat has wonderful retopo tools.
Studio and Poser compute the normals direction by using wonding order so there is no need to save specific polygon by polygon normals data.
Not necessarily. If you have adjusted the normals, to affect the way the model responds to light, they may be needed (I can't recal if 3D Coat will do that) but if they are just the defaults then they will be recosntructed from the winding order when the OBJ is opened so they aren't needed.
Yah, winding order, darn fingers are acting up early today.
You guys just used a term I never heard of before... Winding Order... So I had to look it up... That lead to so many other interesting topics and articles ranging from quantum physics to data storage... So now I just spent an hour and a half reading things that have caused several hundred neurons to actually implode... But at least I now know it probably is possible to make an object (in real life) 100% invisible... Though, currently only if it's a super cold sodium atom... But anyway, all that interestingness did not yield an actual definition for Winding Order... But by reading through a bunch of threads and posts at various CGI and coding forums, I am lead to believe that...Winding Order is the process by which a program determines which direction the normals face for rendering? That sound right?... So that leads to a different question... Aside from SketchUp which is terrible at that, isn't that pretty much automatic in most modeling programs and only needs fiddling with if something horrible occurs?... How is one adjusting the normals to affect how the model responds to light?... Does that mean reversing the normals, specifying that back faces are rendered, or adjusting the smoothing angle? Or is that so other option? I'm really curious about this because from what I picked up, it seems pretty important and not something one wants to mess with if its not reversed normals, rendering back faces or smoothing.
It's about shading of 3d geometry derived from the direction of the normals of vertices; information for the renderer about soft edges vs hard edges, or curved (continuous) surfaces vs a collection of flat surfaces meeting at an angle. Winding order of vertices only determines what side of a triangle or quad is in and what side is out.
Okay, thanks. So I guess then, this is not something we generally have control over?... Perhaps also why without adjusting the smoothing angle in DAZ/Poser, some models exported from certain programs, are slightly more faceted looking than others... Even though within those programs the smoothing angles may be identical? I've noticed for example that Blender models export smoother looking than Wings3D models.
Facetting is affected mainly by the smoothing angle. Winding Order is whether, when you look at the polygon, the vertices are assigned to the polygon clockwise (normal towards you) or anti-clockwise (normal away - I hope I have that the right way round). Flipping normals, to fix reversed normals, simply involves changing the order in which the vertices are listed in the polygon's definiton.
oooookaaay ... so today I exported out an .obj file with that option unchecked and nothing exploded :-) ty.
Well, I bought it... Now comes the fun part... Learning how to properly use it to make super awesome fun time models for use in DAZ/Poser.