Aabel

I've nearly stopped using Zbrush completely since I got 3d-Coat. Zbrush is not a complete solution for making production ready models for animation. It will let you sculpt lots of detail sure, but recovering that detail into something useful in production is something you will be looking outside of Zbrush to get done. I am finding that a lot of the detail I would previously sculpt in zbrush as geometry I instead paint into as normal map texture in 3d-coat. This is far quicker, more resource efficient and gets better results. Being able to go from sculpt to production ready textured asset inside one program is such an incredible advantage it isn't to be overlooked for the relatively minor advantages Zbrush offers. Zbrush has a very slick and hip marketing campaign behind it to help cover up it's massive flaws and outright omissions. Don't get sucked in by it. There is a reason they won't let you try it before dropping almost $800 on it.

Keep in mind that application isn't a full realization of the ADF algorithm. It's a first pass. As it gets refined it will be able to handle infinite resolution. Perfectly sharp edges, paper thin shells. The possibility for an application based on ADF to take the lead in CG sculpting is very real and very much a threat to every current player in the field. Since ADF is locked down with patents the only real hope of competing is something like OpenVDB.

Glad to see this technology getting some attention in sculpting. Hopefully this will be expanded into a true non-destructive sculpting application.

I have to say I like him more without legs. He doesn't look like a worm with both arms and legs. His mouth also is reading a bit flat, if you could curve it around his head a bit more it would add more depth and interest to him. He could also use a few more worm anatomy details.

Yeah you can bring the resolution you want to remesh back into 3d-coat, and retopo just the eyes, You may even be able to just drag the verts around till they line up how you want. Then go back to zbrush, and reproject your details. In the future though You may want to save retopologizing till you have established all the major landmarks of the form, including things like eyes, mouth etc. Also try sculpting in 3d-Coat, it's actually quite good, and it doesn't fight you as much for production work as Zbrush does.

Yeah Mari is a beautiful piece of software engineering, and a true wonder for film work, but all the stuff that makes it so great and worth it's price for film, are things that games don't really have a need for.

Animation isn't a requirement. I've made digital assets and used them in Unity that don't have anything at all to do with animation. One of the tutorials on using the Houdini Engine with Unity uses NURBS, and it works in Unity, a game engine with no NURBS support. It sounds like your opposition is based on personal preference of where the developers of 3d-Coat spend their time, rather than an actual technical limitation of 3d-Coats architecture (a limitation may exist). Nothing wrong with that. However I posted this in the SDK/Plugins section of the forum for a reason, and not the official feature request because I want to know if the existing SDK (looks like it's not a C++ sdk) has any blatant limitations that would prevent the integration of the Houdini engine. You not seeing what the Houdini Engine brings to the table doesn't mean it wouldn't be useful for other people. Anyway it looks like supporting sculpting apps is on the radar of Side Effects software, hopefully 3d-Coat will be one of them. One of the developers seems rather excited about the possibilities, as do other Houdini users.

What's so different about 3d-coat it wouldn't work? It works in C4d, Unity, Maya, Max (added by a third party) and soon Unreal Engine 4. Having used it myself in Unity it's surprisingly flexible in what it allows one to bring across. I really don't see what makes 3d-Coat so special that it can't use another library, that is after all what the Houdini Engine is.

Here's another example, say you wanted to shell/extrude some faces real fast in the retopo room, well you could do that with the Houdini Engine.

Uhm why wouldn't I? Houdini digital assets would allow you to basically make your own plugins without having to program. It would open a whole world of options to 3d-Coat and make 3d-Coat a powerful tool for editing volumes in Houdini.

Yup and it's oh so yummy, still not 100% perfect but it's a huge step up from other initial bind weights that are available in Maya

3d-Coat should go beyond app-link and integrate the Houdini Engine.

Is the SDK in 3d-Coat robust enough to allow the Houdini engine to be integrated with 3d-Coat? The API for the Houdini Engine is publicly available now. Houdini Engine would give us a powerful suite of procedural tools at our disposal in 3d-Coat. Way better noise than anything Zbrush will ever have, production proven volumes in the form of OpenVDB, and lots of other stuff that would take too long to list.

Interesting stuff but meh honestly, those features give me more questions than answers. No snapping was shown, nor was any grid or coherent unit system useful outside of Zbrush. low poly stuff isn't really a point of pain in using zbrush in a pipeline, plenty of other tools to handle that work. It's the getting all that detail created in Zbrush out to be rendered that is a pain. Zbrush has crap remeshing, crap UV tools, crap texture painting, and crap baking. You make a stupidly high res mesh and hopefully you have tools to help you get something usable out of all that data you've generated. I can't wait to see what features of Zbrush these new modeling tools will and will not work with and what constraints they will place on workflow. The reason I came to 3d-coat is because it offers an end to end solution for sculpting models, I can make stupidly high res models (64bit already thank you very much) and I can topologize, UV and texture them to a production quality levels. What Pixologic has shown so far does nothing to alleviate the pain points I experience in using Zbrush. Chasing hard surface modeling and doing it with subd's is a fools errand in my opinion. Subd's have real issues depicting accurate surfaces with good continuity. You will always have pinching artifacts and you will always have soft edges and a lack of continuity. Pixologic isn't doing anything new adding these kinds of modeling features to zbrush to make it more attractive for hard surface modeling, they are going down a well worn path with lots of known issues. Personally I find MoI3d far more impressive for intuitive and accurate hard surface modeling.

Micromesh is ok, for what it is it's kinda meh, but it's really the best that can be done with a polygonal based solution. There are much better options that would be well suited to 3d-coat. Mesh quilting comes to mind as does this. There is a lot of power to still be tapped in volumetric modeling. The mesh smoothing in Zbrush is far from no effort. Getting a refined surface that maintains its structure and artistic intent takes tremendous effort in Zbrush, though I will say it does seem to be harder in 3d-coat, particularly in surface mode! I am still having difficulty getting to the same level of surface refinement in 3d-coat that I achieve in Zbrush.