Smart Material Preview looks way different than filled texture - why?

[nwitchell]

I haven't been using 3D Coat very long so I'm more than willing to admit operator error here, but I've been playing with building smart materials and I'm very excited about what's possible, yet I've run into this frustrating hiccup where the smart material preview looks terrific and detailed, but when I try to fill that texture to the layer, the result looks horrible, blurry, and splotchy.  I though that the resolution of the texture might be the issue, but I'm getting the same problem even with 8k textures.  Is there a reason that this is happening?  What am I doing wrong?

[Riddell]

Hi nwitchell, I have been practicing with the PBR smart materials for a good few weeks now and have been able to achieve much higher quality by using a combination of high resolution textures and a nice high resolution mesh/UV. Are you painting directly onto Voxels or do you have a nice UV map that you are working with? If your UV map is stretched and distorted your painting will look ugly.

 

Looking at your first image, it looks like you have a bit of distortion/artifacting in your mesh.

 

Here is an idea of the kind of quality that can be achieved with 3Dcoats Smart Materials: http://roughmetal.duckdns.org/assets/img/metal_raw_worn_full.png

 

Another user of the forum has literally hundreds of awesome Smart Materials available as well if you are interested: https://gumroad.com/michaelgdrs

[digman]

Your model itself has a lot of artifacts as Riddell said. It is possible that your voxel/surface mode object is hiding the baked normal map model.

If this is the case under the View window deselect "show voxels in paint room"

Please give your complete workflow otherwise we are just shooting in the dark.

[nwitchell]

That's exactly what it was, digman.  I didn't realize I was looking at two models overlapped.  Once I turned off the voxel model the texture was nice and crisp.  And yes, it certainly isn't a model for the recordbooks, is it?  I just wanted to see what the workflow looked like from sculpt to topology/UV to painting.  Thanks for the help, fellas.