Percevan

first, nice models AND paint job. well done! once you have set the painting condition, there are three settings (that I know of at least), that can have a big impact to get tight or wide, soft or sharp, fuzzy or clear "edge painting": the most obvious: degree, which can be set (much) higher than 100% by the way (can be useful in some cases, and such "boost" can give interesting result when choosing a "less on..." option). first setting on the right of the condition at the top (when using nomal material painting). next on the right again: 'contrast', positive or negative... the latter can be a better choice in some cases, experiment! and third, in the smart material editor, you also have "edge scattering", which can be filtered with a texture, or noise. this one, combined with 'contrast' and 'degree', can give interesting variations. that's the basics, I'd say, but they already offer subtle range of options, depending of what you're trying to get. After that, smart marterial layering, masking, etc, extent the possibilities even more.

Hi, Take the following with a big grain of salt since I haven't been deeply delving into 3D-coat In's and outs for a long time myself, but: 1. generally yes, though If you don't fully fill a big mesh but rather paint some part(s) with other painting tools, that's not necessarily an issue. And even if you do (fill tool, big retopogroup object)... well, in most case even non-tilable textures can be useful as inputs in smart materials to fill objects, since they can easily be hidden either manually afterwards or from other layers of the same material. here's one of my first experiments with 3Dcoat's SM, 3 layers (at the time), 2 textures, and the sandy ones used in the wavy grooves (concave parts) of the mesh is definitely non-tileable. I didn't even have to repaint on seams thanks to edge scattering and some noise in the material settings. 2. I would recommend the opposite actually. I don't see how auto-mapping would give any benefits, except for experimenting and self-learning Smart Materials, imho.

err... which other programs?? you are not even mentioning that. Have you even decided on one final purpose, and 3D application, for your work?

Just building up some personal experience with 3DC voxel tools, in the present case with Cut out and Vox Hide mainly. Simple but very fun to do. Here's a test concept with rampart/battlement wall segment (and I just put a smart material on it for visualisation purposes, nothing final). This will probalby be used to make static meshes for a Skyrim Mod (Hoddminir, for anyone interested )

I would uncheck "Import with Thickness, in the tool option panel.

Hi, I am what you would call a "traditional polygon pusher" I guess, with the occasional 3D sculpting here and there (once using Zbrush). Mainly, I'm using Maya (started with Wings3D, still use it sometimes for quick prototyping or mesh correction), but I find myself using 3D-Coat more and more. Funny enough, I initially went with it for texturing only, but I never cease to be impressed by its sculpting tools, not to mention UV and retopo. I'm currently experimenting with smart materials too. The only current drawback is that 3D coat as futher reduced my sleeping time, in a good way!