Hey guys, I'm a Blender user and I know 3D coat from long ago, I used version 3 in the past (along with Max when I worked in a studio)
I'm doing game arts, although I'm not primarily an artist these days, and I've been evaluating some options for quickly texturing my models. For anything "quick" the so called "smart materials" are a must, and I should say that 3D coat, although less complex than Substance Painter for example (which have 'thickness' and some cool generators like edge scratches) it actually does a much better job at determining curvature (actually, for my needs it's better than xNormal) and applying the actual smart "masks"
What I like better in SP is the non-destructive workflow, and more standardized masking style. Resizing the texture without losing quality also is (would be) something invaluable, but from my tests it doesn't really work as I was expecting. The caveats are huge though. It generates lots of discontinuity on the seams, what makes them very visible, especially when you use something like the curvature mask in a generator, and "tri-planar" projection doesn't help in that case, also, it's very slow. My machine isn't very modern so I can understand some slowness here and there, but I was literally waiting minutes (with all cores @ 100%) only to change the brush material. It's also a pain to work with multiple 'objects' in substance. 3D coat is also not very stable, but it's light years ahead of SP in terms of performance, and I've tried DDO too but I was not even a bit impressed
So far 3D coat has been a joy to use. Texturing is only one of the many great functions it has, and stuff like Ptex support may come handy someday, retopo is something that I'm sure I'll use on a regular basis, especially for quick yet decent looking LOD models
That being said, I'm a struggling with the total lack of information for some functions... the interface is really well-made and makes sense most of the time, but I wonder if I'm overlooking something or if I'm really supposed to /guess/ most things and learn by trial and error based on guesswork
The first thing that really annoyed me is the lack of real 'materials'. The materials are just diff+spec+gloss+bump maps that are applied to the layers. Once it's applied you can't change it. I don't have much of a problem with that, except the fact that they don't stack very well and are not easy to mask. If you want to apply a material to the 'non-convex' areas AND the occluded areas (btw, imho the lit/shadow should be renamed to 'occluded') you need the two "masks/conditions", one for "less on convex" and other for "more on lit", but you can't have more than one condition, so you need a smart material layer (not paint layer) for each of them, and the bumps will affect each other when they overlap. While we are still on the materials subject, I also don't understand how or why the current tool depth/opacity settings affect the material you have selected... shouldn't it be the other way around? Anyway, it seems the current tool depth/opacity is a multiplier for the material settings (guesswork), but the roughness/metalness doesn't seem to affect them. That is inconsistent and counter-intuitive, but the worst part is the total lack of information on that. At very least I don't what the current tool settings affecting the materials when I right-click them and select "fill layer"
Bump is also a bit of a pain... I fully understand it's additive (I know you can disable for the tools), and there's no way afaik to set a layer to override the bump on a layer below it, so you have to use the top layer as a clipping layer, what actually works really well, but you're limited to one clipping layer, what's not very suitable for most stuff. I'm talking mostly about really simple stuff here, for example, you have a base layer of a metal material that's rough, and on top of that you want a paint layer that's smooth, and perhaps on top of that some grunges with yet another surface bumpiness, but you don't want it to inherit the bumpiness of the bottom layers... how would you do that in a sane way
Something that I don't know if it's possible, is to use the paint bucket to paint individual "surface materials", not whole connected meshes, in a "click-over" fashion. I know there are buttons which displays a dialog in which you can choose which "surface material" or "paint object" to paint, but I would like something like the normal bucket except not propagating the paint to adjacent materials
Another smaller complaint I have is the price. The price is a steal for a studio, but for indies it's not a very accessible product. These days some software have "indie" versions with income limitations, and I humbly suggest that 3D coat provide some "indie-friendly" licensing, especially if a price increase for the pro version is planned. It's still worth every cent of the current price, even for indies, but it may simply not be an option for some people. I feel that the pricing is in a mid-ground that is cheap for studios, and expensive for individuals, especially considering the cornucopia of competitors these days (not in a single package) that do have indie-friendly licensing
I also miss some UI interactions, for example, an easy way to reset values to the default. On Blender you can right-click any widget to reset its value, on 3D coat right-clicking most UI widgets yields no effect whatsoever. Also, I'm used to Blender's middle-click-drag scrolling and I really love it. I was very impressed that 3d coat also has that, however, Blender is much better in a sense because it's "infinite", when you reach the boundary of the scrolling area the cursor will wrap around it, so you can scroll really large areas without having to release the middle button, in 3D coat if you leave the window while middle-drag scrolling, it glitches and you gotta middle click again to 'fix' that. Also, if you middle-drag on a dialog that's over the 3D view, it will interact simultaneously with the UI and the 3D view. And I also really miss the ability of ALT-clicking a layer visibility/lock to affect all other layers, like on Photoshop. When you have lots of layers and want to lock them all but one, it's a royal pain in the rear to go clicking them all individually. I hope there's some shortcut of kinds I'm missing
I know that the UI is designed also (if not mostly) for tablets, I have a tablet here but I can't get much used to it, plus I plan to use 3D coat for quick texturing at the moment, not actual detail painting
Please don't get me wrong, I really love 3D coat, and although it's arguable whether it's as powerful as other specialized tools, I really like the idea of a single program with many functions, so you don't have to keep switching interfaces too much. Only Blender+3D coat+Photoshop+Unity is already very painful, let alone include ZBrush, Substance Painter, Topogun, etc in the mix. It's gonna cause madness probably. I also think 3D coat would be a very good complement for many other 3D packages out there like Modo/LW for example
If anything I said is wrong or has a workaround, I'd appreciate if someone could point that out. Thanks