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Hey folks, I am Rkhane / Red Rogers. I want to make miniatures/board games. I started off sculpting using Sculptris (Nov 2010), then after a couple years I needed something to edit and add joints to my sculpts to make miniatures, tried the 3d Coat demo, figured out what I needed fairly fast and purchased it to better compose my work and also do some hard surface work like guns. After about a year of using 3d Coat I began to tire of some of Sculptris's limitations, namely no 64 bit support i.e. more polys, so I started to use 3d coat for sculpting all around. Great app! For my first post I am working on a board game that will eventually be Kickstarted. It is called Hell Rangers. Nothing super original, Kind of like the video game Doom but on earth. Demons invade through ancient artifacts being ignited/turned on. Apocalypse ensues and the result is humanity bands together to create a forward operational military command known as Hell Rangers to go and take the fight to the enemy. Sorry for all the branding on the images, I mean this to be a product eventually and will be posting these images elsewhere like my deviant art gallery First up is The Colonel known as Colonel Cray. He is a special character for the game. He also uses the base armor/weapons used by the majority of Hell Rangers. So this work will be used on all the good guys in the game. Process: Base shapes/meshes blocked/roughed out in Sculptris for the armor and the Colonel himself, then base sculpting, detail sculpting, painting direct on high poly meshes and final rendering in 3d coat. No texturing in external apps, no effects/Photoshop except composing the image with text and the simple drop shadow. Image is basically a raw render from 3d Coat. The guns, chain blade and base were sculpted entirely in 3d Coat. All meshes were painted directly on high poly meshes, no autopo/retopo as I haven't explored that part of 3d yet I will figure it out eventually when I need to have a bunch of characters in renders altogether. ___________________________________________________________ Here are the base sculpts somewhat laid out before painting them. Here is the chest armor with a base shader material I created for the armor and then painted the model green. Chest armor fully painted then textured with different brushes in 3d Coat. I kept the green paint on its own layer, the metal silver and gold paint on another layer. This way I can easily change the base color of the armor if need be via the Hue/Saturation tool in the Paint Room. Chest, Helmet and belt painted and done. Full armor and weapons layout, painted and done. Colonel Cray, painted, tatt'ed and done. I didn't put veins/scars on all his body since the majority of it won't show. Kind of bugs me though, for consistency reasons Final full statue of Colonel Cray and slain demon on base done. Front view. Transparent helmet visor done by choosing a material shader that has the transparency option, duplicating it and setting the transparency to .4. Works fairly well for the intended effect. Back/quarter view. 3/4 view. 3/4 rear view. Top down view. Detail front view. Detail back view. I would like to make two alternate heads for the statue, one with helmet, one without. Detailed view of base including unpainted, then painted. About 30mil poly count total for the entire statue including base. Even though the board game mini obviously does not need such detail, I would like to make this statue someday so there it is Things of note: For sculpting nice detail on mesh: Put mesh in surface mode, select Live Clay Build Brush, set detail fr4om 1-5, beware, more detail = more polys, then go at it. Creates awesome small minute details. For painting skin in Paint Room: Paint the base color of the skin all around. Then use the option to paint More In Cavity, choose a slightly darker color, might have to set Cavity Scale to maybe 2, then paint in all the depth/cracks on the mesh. Then switch to Less In Cavity, switch to a lighter skin tone than the original (might need to use Sampler Tool to get correct color), may need to switch Cavity Scale to 3 or 4, and then paint model on all sides. Using the base paint brush in the Paint Room and More in Cavity/Less in Cavity really works good and fast for many things (weapons/armor/skin). Not as great as artistic brushing everywhere but as you can see from the above, the result is not "bad". I found the More In Cavity/Less In Cavity painting to work best for skin when you use just slightly lighter colors to go darker and lighter. I use stronger color variations for armor/weapons to really pronounce the edges. Issues: Some issues I had with 3d Coat along the way. When importing a 3b files with multiple color layers in the paint room, it disperses them in the currently opened file across many layers, therefore losing the structure. Opened a bug report for this: http://3d-coat.com/mantis/view.php?id=1650 Tried painting glowing/luminance directly on high poly model, didn't quite work, chatting about it here: http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16796 Things I would like: I know like everybody uses external render'ers to create the final product but I quite like 3d Coats Render Room. the ability to rig lights, place them where you want them around the scene, choose if they are static or revolve with the model, and choose their depth and how focused they are would be killer. Being able to assign multiple materials/shaders to a mesh would be awesome and also assigning the material options like Darken/Overlay/Highlight/Multiply/Color Burn etc would be killer for subtle details/light sources. The ability to export rendered images with a transparent background so you can more easily add one later (especially for a 3d turnaround with hundreds of images in a movie editor) would be wonderful. Last but not least the ability to add luminance/glows around an individual mesh and how much it glows would be awesome. You could have glowing eyes, weapons, fireballs etc. Something very simple like this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QAHIYCYB3o where you just check a box, click glow, choose the glow color, how strong it is and done. Like an Outer Glow in Photoshop but all around the 3d object, not just on a 2d plane. So sick! With a few of those features and using the ability to run the camera around at various points which 3d Coat already does, I think we could make some insanely awesome 3d turnarounds without ever leaving the program. Sweet! Anyway, love 3d Coat, Zbrush made me want to stab something due to its "unique interface" and terms. Been a computer graphic artist professionally for 16 years, never encountered a program I couldn't just "figure out" until I met Zbrush. Sculptris then 3d Coat saved the day, very intuitive! My main reason for posting here is like with everyone else, to show that 3d Coat is a great app that should perhaps be taken a bit more seriously than the big 3 i.e. Zbrush/Max/Maya. Will be posting more werks soon, thanks!