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How Do You Use 3DC in your daily work ?


Carlosan
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62 members have voted

  1. 1. Areas

    • Paint
      49
    • Tweak
      6
    • Retopo
      42
    • Bake
      22
    • Uv
      34
    • Sculpt
      48
    • Render
      6
    • Television
      6
    • Films
      5
    • Games
      29
    • Print/Web (Advertising in general)
      7


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  • 2 weeks later...
  • Advanced Member

My semi-vague workflow:

1 - Sculpt:

I can't say for sure, but I think my most used sculpting tools are (in order of importance): Primitives (duh), Move, Build, Clay, CutOff, Flatten, Plane, Extrude, Pose. (and of course Smooth, but that's included with all tools)

I make heavy use of symmetry, try to keep things as simple as possible at first. I have a lot of general rules, but with sculpting I always tell myself "It's okay if it looks terrible, unless it's finished". Big fan of SymCopy, love instances when it comes to tiling geo, or "TSculpts" as I've come to call them. The "T" is for Texture.

 

2 - Retopo:

I've only ever used the Autopo feature to show someone a quick example of sculpt-to-low-poly painting. Otherwise everything I do is manually retopo'd. 95% just the Points / Faces tool. Though often times I will start with the Strokes tool on applicable areas. It can sometimes get pretty fiddly when you need to make selections and transform them, it's not entirely ideal for accuracy but for loose work that doesn't require vert X to match vert Y wihle being aligned to vert Z, it's pretty rapid.

 

3 - UV's

All done in the retopo room. I've never needed to import a mesh to unwrap in 3dc but I'm not ruling out the possibility in the future, I tend to mirror/overlay in my unwraps a lot, and at first I found this quite unwieldy in 3dc but a smart approach to the retopo often does most of the legwork for you.

 

4 - Bake

No matter how much I check the inner and outer projections for leaks. The first, second, and often third bakes are never right. I believe this is largely just me dealing with super low poly stuff on a regular basis. The overall shape of the sculpt has a lot to do with it too of course, so I can't complain about situation-dependent stuff too much. Sometimes it's flawless, sometime's it's not. That's life. I quite like the addition of the influence sphere things, but I find them to be quite un-user-friendly. (sorry, this is sounding like a feature complaint!). I've only ever baked (merged) with normal map to per pixel.

 

5 - Paint

I try to get the base of it done in 3dc, and when I reach a point that's easier to work on in PS, I'll drop out of 3dc.

Start off by changing my AO layer to Multiply, and the other layers to Standard Blend (except normal map, obviously). Create blank layers for base colours. Another layer for scratches/wear/tear (if applicable). I also almost always do a "Boost" layer (it's what I call it) which is just flat-grey (128,128,128) set to overlay, and then go over it with the Darken/Lighten tool.

 

Tools most used: Brush, Smooth, Lighten/Darken, Erase. Fill (also the "inbetween" tools like Smooth and Colour Picker) Pretty sure I haven't actually touched any of the others. 

 

I'll be honest, I've never really touched the spec or depth features in the paint room. If I ever need to paint normalmap details it means I did something wrong on the sculpt, and I tend to take care of specularity in PS but I have been meaning to find out how it all works in 3dc.

 

So that's my day to day use... didn't mean for it to get all wordy like that. My bad.

 

Edit

Oh! Almost forgot... the ending! A quick "File > Export Model" in the paint room to get my lowpoly out. And of course "Textures > Export > All Layers Colour" to get the .PSD.

Edited by Gary Dave
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  • 3 weeks later...
  • Advanced Member

my workflow (characters) :

 

C4d: build model out of primitives, some quick box modelling on separate parts. ( i just find it easier to build a dynamic sillouette, where i can move each object around, without baking it/having a tonne of layers. also 4 view mode is very handy)

 

3d coat: voxel all the primitives together, smooth out edges. massage the shape a bit more if necessary.

 

retopo in 3d coat.

 

Bring it back to c4d, to do some modelling adjustments. Eg, extrude the edge loops around eye sockets, add some tightness loops, so it smooths nice with subd surfaces. ( a lot easier in c4d, since you see how the edge loops affect the smoothing in real time.

 

Take it to 3d coat to uv unwrap.

 

then depending on the model, i'll either paint it in 3D coat, and export to c4d for final rendering.

 

Or i'll take it to c4d first, do some detail sculpting ( with layers, got to have my layers)

 

then bring it back to 3d coat for texture painting. and then back to c4d for final rendering/rigging/animation

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...
  • Member

I primarily create a base mesh in Blender or Maya and then port it over to 3d Coat.

 

There I will usually sculpt on it.

 

After I get done there I generally retopo the mesh and then unwrap it.  I absolutely love unwrapping in this program.

 

When retopo and unwrap is done I generally move on to painting. 

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  • 4 months later...
  • Member

I mostly use 3D-Coat for games in Unity.

When it comes to characters and some of the organic environment, I pretty much do everything in 3D-Coat: Sculpting, Retopo, UV, Baking.

But when I create hardsurface stuff, I prefer modeling in Blender. Then, sometimes I will use 3D-Coat for Painting.

Edited by Shu
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