Painting

Painting Workspace

As a 3D analog to various 2D painting applications, 3D Coat`s Painting Room allows you to quickly create detailed textures for your models. All tools should be familiar if you are familiar with Photoshop tools. Using layers to create seamless textures of organic characters, mechanical objects, or landscape elements with a familiar brush-based interface. Intuitive brush controls can be changed on-the-fly with the mouse.

With Painting Room, you can create multiple types of textures simultaneously: Diffuse/Albedo Color, Glossiness/Metalness, and Depth (which can be exported as Bump, Displacement, or Normal Maps). Color layers can also be exported as other maps, including Vertex Weight Maps, Emissive/Luminosity Maps, and more.

Paint with the aid of the Stencils Panel, repetitive Strips Panel, and complex masking to realize your final texturing details.

Whenever increased precision is required, use the Stroke Mode Spline and Line-based Brush tools. From this same Panel, utilize the Stamp tool to place repetitive Brush shapes.

Maximizing productivity, Smart Materials composed of separate maps at Painting Room allows you to create PBR textures simultaneously. Using 3DCoat Smart Materials on colors and values, paint texture channels simultaneously (depth, color, glossiness), specular, and metalness.

At paint when 3DCoat uses Mip Maps?
The proper texture filtering is in the render room. In the painting room, there is no mipmapping now to speed up the real-time painting process.

Painting room features

– Use your tablet and stylus to create precise textures and effects you need for your models. Whenever higher precision is required, you can use the different modes of the Hub Mode panel.

– Painting with the help of templates, stripes of repeating patterns, and Smart materials consists of separate depth, color, gloss, and metalness textures that only work when activated by the corresponding buttons on the surface.

– Export any texture map in exactly the format you need, with or without alpha channels, and with just the right amount of cushioning of your UV maps.

– Use Viewer reference images for better orientation and any Paint wheel image for color duplication and reference.

– Customize your Brush Alpha Panel with a complete arsenal of your favorite brushes and brush settings. Every time you start 3DCoat, everything is ready.

– Test your different UV unwrapping schemes within the UV Room before you export.

– You can also paint Vertex Color Maps directly onto your voxel of surface sculptures and use the latest texturing techniques with Ptex.

– Bake your vertex colors and Ptex textures to standard UV Maps for versatile usage anywhere.

– Use Viewport reference images for enhanced guidance as well as any image as a Painting Wheel for color duplication and reference.

– Customize your Brush Alpha Panel with a complete arsenal of your favorite Brushes and Brush settings, ready to be used each time you start 3DCoat.

– See exactly what you are going to get, in real-time, before you export to external applications for final production.

– Use the Texture UV Editor to paint only with those aspects of your texture desired directly on the UV Map for the utmost precision.

When you need to paint very detailed and precise textures but not displacement, choose the PerPixel Painting texturing mode. If you need to paint with heavier displacement values, choose the MicroVertex Painting (Displacement) mode. Or, you can paint without the concerns of UV Map seams with Ptex.

You can also paint vertex colors directly on your Surface Models as well as utilize the newest texturing techniques with Ptex Painting.

Menus for the Painting

Top Bar Tool Parameters

Top Bar Tool Parameters
The upper Brush Parameters Panel contains toggles for functions like “Depth, Smoothing, Opacity, and Glossiness” with Conditions in the Painting Room in the form of a switchable icon (that switches between Mouse response and Tablet Response).

Painting Parameters & Toolset

Left tool panel
Depth, Color, Glossiness Channels

Painting Layers
Painting Layers Blending and Mask

Painting with Smart Materials
Preview Options

Color Picker, Image color panel & Custom Color Palettes

Painting Shortcuts

Viewport Navigation & Hotkey Assignment: This video covers the subjects of Viewport Navigation in 3D Coat, as well as assigning matching hotkeys in 3DCoat to tools like them in Photoshop.

Import & Export

Import painting
Export painting

How To

Viewport Navigation & Hotkey Assignment: This video covers the subjects of Viewport Navigation in 3D Coat, as well as assigning matching hotkeys in 3DCoat to tools like them in Photoshop.

How to swap UVs: This video covers one easy method in 3DCoat, to modify a model’s UVs after doing some texture painting work….without any penalty.

Sketching in 3DCoat: This video begins a brief series demonstrating 3D Coat’s Sketching capabilities and unique appeal as a Sketching tool in any artist’s pipeline.

Technical Information

Quick Start: Painting Workspace

PhotoShop-Centric UI: This video begins a series covering the Painting Tools and showing some common elements between Photoshop and 3DCoat.

Live Photoshop Connection: This video demonstrates the link between 3DCoat’s Painting Workspace and Photoshop. Alternatively, you can assign a different Image Editing application instead of Photoshop (EDIT menu, Preferences, General Tab, External 2D Editor), as long as it can edit PSD files.

Krita and 3DCoat workflow: Krita and 3DCoat can work seamlessly together and exchange layered images with just a few mouse clicks. Krita is known as the “Photoshop replacement on Linux”. See http://www.krita.org/ for more information about Krita.

PBR texture conversion: how content created for traditional shaders can be converted to PBR shaders, how to convert content from one PBR workflow to another, and explain the various differences in modern workflows.By Joe Wilson.

Clear All Unused Painting Layers: This video covers a small but helpful workflow enhancement in the Painting Workspace of 3DCoat. If one needs to re-attempt the Texture Baking process, the objects and painting layers need to be cleared first to prevent duplicates. This tool helps speed up clearing the Painting Layers…with a single click.

Quick Tip AO Baking Troubleshooting: This video demonstrates a Quick Tip about troubleshooting AO baking in 3DCoat, should a user encounter an unreasonable amount of lag.

Tip for Fixing Visual Anomalies

Alpha import: How to import a texture to be used as layer transparency information (Alpha channel) inside 3DCoat. Actually, importing alpha information directly into 3D Coat is impossible, but it shows a short workaround to do it anyway.
Additionally, explain how to paint flexible alpha information and how the “Linked layer” function helps here. By Christoph Werner.

Painting Examples

PBR painting test: A quick base demo of the new painting system. By DoctorDanko.

PBR texturing in 3DCoat: Big thanks to Jaakko Saari for this detailed tutorial about PBR texturing.

Texture Painting: This is a demonstration of some of the more common Painting tools one might use on a similar project. It is not intended to be a tutorial on texturing painting techniques.

Hand-painted Weapon by Angelina Diez.

Fantasy dagger texturing tutorial by mikibencz.

Polypainting – Unique Sculpting Features: This video begins a series highlighting some of the unique features in 3DCoat that helps set it apart. It begins by showing how 3DCoat leverages PBR Texture Painting and High Poly Sculpting simultaneously…taking care of two normally time-consuming and tedious tasks at once and done rather quickly.

Painting Mesh to Sculpt Mesh: This video demonstrates the steps needed to send a copy of a Painting Mesh to the Sculpt Workspace (where it becomes a Sculpt Mesh that can be voxelized or have dynamic tessellation applied to it) and bake small-scale sculpting edits back to the Painting Mesh via a new normal map.

From Painting Room to Sculpt and back again: This video demonstrates a method one can use to get your model….fully displaced (with any work you may have already done using image-based sculpting)…from the Painting Room to the Voxel Room to make some sculpting edits there.
Then bake a new, updated displacement map that can be added to the Painting Room.

Applying a Decal or Image: This video demonstrates three methods and toolsets for applying a decal/logo or any image to your model.

Emissive Maps: This old video demonstrates the usage of Specular Color and Emissive (Glow) Maps.

FURTHER READING

Basic Theory of Physically-Based Rendering – By Jeff Russell

Physically Based Rendering And You Can Too! – By Joe Wilson

Scene Setup for Painting