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Are there any rendering engines that "play well" with 3D Coat?


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Looking for something that supports 3D Coat's PBR materials, can easily be exported to, and can get great rendering results.  3D-Coat's render tab is great but when you're trying to build an environment inside it, it just gets ridiculous.  

 

So far I've tried: 

  • Unity (Works but isn't really the best for photoreal renders)
  • Unreal Engine (Everything I import looks like trash compared to inside 3D Coat)
  • Vray in Maya (meh)
  • Mentalray in 3Ds Max (meh)
  • Bunkspeed Shot (Fails to import 3D Coat's textures)
  • Lumion (Looks decent but the program doesn't support specular/gloss maps)

Anyone found an obscure renderer that works really well with 3D Coat?  

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I use Blender Cycles (GPU or Cpu) with the Simple PBR  Roughness / Metalness Shader. There are other shader nodes out there. Malo might jump in here and share which one he uses. This one is fast and easy to set up... 

Attached image... One is Blender Cycles the other 3DC...

 

Unreal 4 works fine with the Roughness / Metalness workflow but you need your Sphere Reflection Capture and it good to use the Lightmass Importance Volume as well. It of course is rendering for a game engine and not the ideal for photoreal but I seen some nice stuff rendered in Unreal. Ah I see you still are having troubles with Unreal Engine, Sketchup...

 

Your setup for working in 3DC is important as well depending upon the final render engine and which of the two workflows of PBR or the Standard workflow you are going to use. Before saying which ones play nice, You would need to know for sure you setup is correct. I am not saying you do not but that it is important information to know.

 

Vray, I do not have it but have Skyped with a  experienced VRay user over the issues they encountered and yes it is tough to get all the conversions you need... Hopefully one day 3DC can have a few material converters.

 

IRay works well in 3DS Max, according to AbnRanger.

 

EDIT: I will make a 3DC to Blender Cycles tutorial when my time gets freer... 

post-518-0-06488700-1452761960_thumb.jpg

Edited by digman
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I've been using a plugin with Cinema 4D called Pixelberg and I've been getting great results. It's a realtime viewport renderer and it does a very good job when working with 3D coat's smart materials. Link here: http://frostsoft.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/pixelberg-beta.html

 

I use a Mac with C4D and I'd been looking at buying a CUDA card and using either Thea renderer or Octane - but I had a play with Pixelberg and it's astonishingly good. It's also saved me a heck of a lot of money!

 

Series of videos here showing it working: 

 

Nice!

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Polyhertz has the 3ds Max applink setup so well that you can practically import your PBR textures in, all setup and ready to render, in Mental Ray or iRay. Obviously you'd want to have your lighting, Exposue and Camera settings setup properly, but importing via the Applink (v1.6 now has it working flawlessly). If you use the .Mat template mentioned in this video, there are some Vray Material and Corona Material templates in that .mat material library, too.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwde7LiJA38

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Houdini's Mantra is very good in rendering PBR textures from 3D-Coat and Substance Designer/Painter. In fact, it's pretty much WYSIWYG if you use Disney's Principled Shader.

Just don't use images generated by Render Room as a reference, because it bleeds too much environment light colour on your model.

Edited by ajz3d
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Unity and the 3d coat unity asset.

 

Unity and alloy.

 

Looks like the 3DC plugin for Unity is free and available at this link...

 

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/49457

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