AbnRanger

He is chin deep in refactoring. He said it's been the most labor-intensive effort he's ever undergone.

Probably not. It might if you plan to do a lot of rendering with a CPU engine. I hate to say this, because I am a big AMD fan. Intel sat on their hands for about 5-7yrs when AMD was down, and not very competitive....Intel only coming out with tiny improvements from one generation to the next. I'm glad AMD caught up and really took it to Intel. However, in terms of clock speed (5Ghz vs 4.2 for the AMD Ryzen 3800X), Intel 9900K might be the best option for 3DCoat. For one, the faster clock speed should help a lot with single-threaded calculations. Secondly, 3DCoat's multi-threading is based on Intel Thread Building Blocks...which is optimized for Intel CPU's. In the past, I noticed quite a bit of difference, but it's unknown if the TBB optimizations hinder the current AMD CPU's. The 9900K is an 8-core/16thread model, for about $500, while the AMD Ryzen 3900X is a 12-core/24 thread model. I would be inclined to go for the 3900X, for the same price. AMD has really boosted their IPC in this latest generation. The next gen ThreadRipper (3950) is supposed to arrive in November. You might wait and see how well that performs. Otherwise, the 2950X ThreadRipper might be the best option (16 cores/32threads)...boost clock to 4.3

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-12-core-3-8-ghz-desktop-processor/6356274.p?skuId=6356274

I think a good AMD Ryzen CPU like the 3800 or 3900X would be plenty of horsepower for the CPU side of things. Faster clock speeds helps, because many calculations in 3DCoat are still single threaded, because they cannot be multi-threaded. I would advise 64GB of RAM, and the faster the better. If you don't normally work with large scenes, you can do fine with 32GB, but 64GB gives you enough headroom to work on a scene with lots of objects with a fair amount of resolution.

Why do people hold Pilgway to a different standard than it's competitors? Allegorithmic doesn't write or update all the applinks to Substance Painter, nor does Pixologic handle all the ZBrush links to 3D apps. It's up to those 3D app developers to keep their ZB links updated. Pixologic will help them if they reach out to them, but they don't bear the responsibility of keeping such applinks updated. Why then, should a much smaller company like Pilgway be any different. They do try to, to some extent, but only the most common 3D apps and sometimes the developers of the applinks are too busy to keep up with those applinks.

....it's not necessary to go to an older version. I think there was some misunderstanding of what the original poster wanted to achieve. Smart Materials are normally photorealistic, but one can modify the settings so it is non-photoreal...such as removing metalness and such.

No. If you had V3, you got a key by email, for V3, just like V4.

Artists at studios like Blizzard use 3DCoat for NPR handpainted textures all the time.

I think Blender is now making a lot of developers sweat and worry a bit. Not just 3DCoat. Still, there are some distinguishing features that 3DCoat and Substance Painter has that Blender doesn't, in terms of Texture Painting. Andrew isn't going to just sit still. In fact, there are some HEAVY feature additions going on, behind the scenes, like a GPU brush engine, nodes, more of the New Curves tools, some similar features as Retopo Draw (by request) which enhance some of the current tools, etc.

The developer working on them made those. When the toolset is complete, there will be more complete videos covering them.

....Also, regarding the BETA curves tools, which the Polyhedron tool is a part of, they are still under BETA development. When Andrew says they are done and no longer Beta, then official feature videos will be made. There are too many changes being made and still to be made, to create them prematurely. For one thing, I asked Andrew, as others have, if he could have the new curves toolbar section tear off and able to pin in the viewport for easier/quicker access. He agreed it should be done, but we will have to see if he does. I would not really want to show the curves without this core functionality.

There are hundreds of tools/features to cover, so Pilgway is not going to create all new videos for them every few years. What you think is antiquated doesn't mean it no longer works. The Paint tools/brushes still work the same today as when the videos for them were made. The videos covering vertex paint are more than sufficient to explain how it works...which is to say, the same as with Paint Meshes that have UV's. Instead of color/gloss/metalness information being stored on a UV map, they are stored on the vertices of a Sculpt Mesh. The videos mention that and that's about all there is to it. No need for a bunch of videos covering it. The videos are stored on Youtube in playlists. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz7E0meXd2yMj4TKY2h0Rbg/playlists It's where most software companies keep their training content, and it's the most high traffic location to store them, so they are easy to find the appropriate video. All you have to do is type the feature in the search field of the channel, and it will usually bring it up. As for the Manual, it is still very adequate for getting around in 3DCoat, although they do need to update it. Artman did a really good job on the LiveClay section.

Make sure you are using the latest build, because I reported an issue just like this and Andrew fixed it, to where it does indeed snap cleanly.

In a lot of situations, it does a really good job. It requires some finessing when the object has complex shapes, but still very useful. I like using it on secondary objects, like teeth, tongue, belts, buttons, etc. Those could eat up a lot of time doing it by hand, and they don't have to have perfect topology.