Advanced Member kirkl Posted June 30, 2013 Advanced Member Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 I bought 3d coat few years ago being interested only in texture painting, mostly per pixel based. For sculpting I have always felt ok in Zbrush and didn't even tried 3dcoat sculpting a lot actually. But gradually I became accoustomed to do texturing in Zbrush too even with its inferior layers support. So I atually didn't open 3d coat for a while alredy. I would be appriciated if sombody tell me what whould I miss in 3dcoat v4 . I tried it for a short time and didn't find anything new in texturing field . Looks like all the progress goes in the sculpting field which is out of my interest unfortunaly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted June 30, 2013 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 For sculpting I have always felt ok in Zbrush.....But gradually I became accoustomed to do texturing in Zbrush too even with its inferior layers support. So I actually didn't open 3d coat for a while already. Sounds like nothing Andrew could add would change your perspective, so why bother even trying? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlosan Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 Hi kirkl which type or work do you do ? The bake system from retopo room to paint room have BIG improvements Magic wand tool added Fill system is better Texture system is better Send layers to external paint app -photoshop like example- have big improvements File formats support improved Emissive blend type Color Specular type Calculate Amblient Occlusion from 1 light Textures adjust improved ------------------------------------- Spherical/Cylindrical mapping introduced for masks and materials 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member kirkl Posted June 30, 2013 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 (edited) Thank you carlosan. There are several definitely usefull things I didn't notice Edited June 30, 2013 by kirkl Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member kirkl Posted June 30, 2013 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 Sounds like nothing Andrew could add would change your perspective, so why bother even trying? Well, Zbrush introduced a few extremely useful procedural things for texturing that somehow made its awful layers tolerable. It doesn't mean I no more in need of a good texturing soft. So I still look for something other. Unfortunately 3d coat always had a few small inconveniences that always bothered be. Materials having only 8bit depth and the material scaling behavior when you can't scale it withing one axis only. If you stretch it, it squeezes in other axis at the same time. And a few other things. So I have never felt comfortable in 3d coat too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted June 30, 2013 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 3DCoat now supports 16 and 32 bit tiff and exr material files plus there is non-tiling mode for materials images as well. The image still is squeezed on both axis, that has not changed though if a request was made you never know... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted June 30, 2013 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 You have a good deal of procedural noise types using the Fill tool, and you can even use a texture map that 3D Coat will do a good job of treating it in a procedural fashion. You can see a little bit of it in the V4 Promo video. Using a Camouflage texture map, I was able to utilize the Fill tool to generate a decent starting point for texturing the Banshee. When you use the Freeze tool in concert with the Fill tool, you can generate a host of base textures to work from, on a single model. I think the most notable improvement in V4, for texture painting is....performance. Bring a model into the Paint Room (PPP mode), using a 4k map, in 3.7.00. Start painting with a medium brush size. No sweat. Since Andrew multi-threaded the Paint Room brushes and worked on the Brush engine a few years ago, it's always been pretty brisk and smooth with small to medium-large brushes. But now try painting with a relatively large brush radius. You'll notice quite a dramatic dropoff in performance. To the point that there is a good degree of noticeable lag occurring. Now try the same test with V4. I was gob-smacked at not only the bump in performance between the two. I also happened to switch to an Intel CPU (rather than the machine with an AMD 6 core CPU I had been using for the past few years...and found that even with V4, the AMD box did fairly well until you started using the large brushes. There was still a very noticeable improvement from 3.7 to V4 on the AMD, but with a comparable Intel CPU (i7 950) running the same test on the same model....the large brush lag was gone. I had been trying for the past few years to get Andrew to do something about the large brush sizes and it seems to largely be and issue with AMD CPU's. Why? Because the core of 3D Coat's multi-threading work is using Intel's (Thread Building Blocks) Library. Naturally Intel has optimized their CPU's to utilize those libraries more efficiently. Call it a dirty trick by Intel or whatever, but the reality is AMD is a step behind both Intel and NVidia, except for gaming. That's where they've chosen to put their investments. So, in light of this little revelation, I would have to now put 3D Coat on par with Mudbox for raw texture painting performance....and that is saying a LOT. When I was using the AMD CPU (running at 4Ghz and 32GB's of RAM at 1866mhz), I showed Andrew the difference between the two apps using this test. When he told me he didn't notice the lag, I thought he was just in denial. Turns out, he was right. In fact, under most conditions, I would have to give 3D Coat the edge in terms of smooth brushing performance. With Mudbox (I have a seat of MB 2012, but used the MB 2014 trial to show Andrew), there is a bit of noticeable lag for an initial second, when using a large brush on a 4k and 8k map. I think it is their recent Gigatexel engine, loading data into Video RAM. It's slightly annoying, but after that initial pause, it's about as fast as it gets. In Contrast, with 3D Coat, there is no pause. It's just smooth from start to finish. For this reason, I would have to say as objectively as I can, there is no reason why 3D Coat shouldn't be the new industry standard in texture painting. Mari is too narrowly focused on the high-end, and with that....a high-end pricetag ($2k+ yearly maintenance). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor artman Posted June 30, 2013 Contributor Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 well first..polypainting with Blending modes...I can't figure how people can polypaint with layers in Zb without blending modes and be happy with that,its just beyond me.... also a totally new raytraced based Clone brush that isn't dependant on screen resolution....If I didn't own a 3DCoat license I would buy it just for that feature... No other apps have this. Personnally Clone brush is one of the main tool I use when texturing and I want to be able to zoom in/out while I paint without constant loss in texture sampling quality. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member kirkl Posted July 1, 2013 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted July 1, 2013 Thanks to everyone for the info. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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