Why I chose 3D Coat over Mudbox 2009

[Nicolas Jordan]

This is my first post on these forums so I will introduce myself to the 3D Coat community and give a brief history. I have been using Lightwave 3D for the last 9 years and I currently work for a small company here in Regina called Liquid Light that does mostly architectural visualization work. I enjoy modeling dinosaurs and other things that interest me in my spare time.

Since I make models of dinosaurs and other things in Lightwave I needed a good program for adding detail to the models and for painting color onto them. I purchased Mudbox 1.0 Basic when it was first released knowing I could add detail to my models with it. I was very impressed with Mudbox fpr sculpting but it still lacked a painting toolset. I waited for the next release of Mudbox that seemed to take forever to come out so I could have a decent painting tools. Finally Mudbox 2009 was released and I put it to the test already having tried out the 3D Coat demo and knowing what 3D Coat was capable of on my system. I found a few design flaws/weaknesses with Mudbox 2009 painting that helped me decide to get 3D Coat instead.

I couldn't create more than one paint layer in Mudbox 2009 at a 4096x4096 because I didn't have enough memory on my video card to hold the image maps. Even with a 256 MB card I got an out of memory error when trying to create a second paint layer. Anyone who has done any work in paint programs like Photoshop, GIMP etc knows that you need lots of layers to have proper control over what your doing. Even if I went out and upgraded my video card to a 1GB card I would still be limited to 5-6 paint layers.

From what I have seen so far 3D Coat has a very well designed painting system. I can add multiple layers without having to create a new image map to hold in memory for each one. I can paint multiple channels all at once unlike Mudbox. 3D Coat has blending modes for layers that are still not present in Mudbox. Mudbox 2009 is still a good tool for sculpting but still a very primitive tool in the area of painting. I still use Mudbox 1.0.7 for most sculpting but I really look forward to seeing voxel sculpting in future versions of 3D Coat.

I am enjoying 3D Coat very much! It has so many different tools that are all very useful. 3D Coat depth painting is very nice because often that all I need. I look forward to being a part of this community. Probably won't be long and I will have some work to show.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Thank you for kind words!

[philnolan3d]

To be honest I tried the demo of MB 2009 when it first came out and Thought the sculpting tools were not too bad, then I tried painting and it crashed before I got a single stroke down. After that it would never load again, even after re-installing. I knew Autodesk would screw it up somehow, but I didn't think it would be that bad. VS is better for sculpting anyway, even in the alpha stages.

[Doug B]

To be honest I tried the demo of MB 2009 when it first came out and Thought the sculpting tools were not too bad, then I tried painting and it crashed before I got a single stroke down. After that it would never load again, even after re-installing. I knew Autodesk would screw it up somehow, but I didn't think it would be that bad. VS is better for sculpting anyway, even in the alpha stages.

Also, MB 2009 needs about 10x the computer resources to run as well as the VS in 3dCoat. I have MB 1 and was considering getting MB 2009 until I tried the demo. I'm currently running an Athlon64 X2 4200 with 4GB ram and an ATI Radeon HD 3600 512mb ram video card and win xp home. Pretty average to trailing edge technology.

MB 1 ran great on this system. To run MB 2009 well, I would need a new power supply, NVIDIA Quadro card, win vista 64 or win xp 64 and a ram upgrade of 8-16 GB. Oh, plus the $400 Cdn for the upgrade of MB1->2. Do the math for total cost, but it is obviously prohibitive for many users who are not high paid Weta sculptors or the like.

I fully realize that MB2 has way more features than MB1, but why the heavy requirements when the same things or better can be done with 3d Coat for the cost of the 3dCoat software full or upgrade price?

Autodesk seems to have a knack for turning everything that they touch into major bloatware.

When you compare 3dC to MB 2009, there is no contest-MB2009 looses every time IMHO.

Cheers all

Doug

[Mantis]

When you compare 3dC to MB 2009, there is no contest-MB2009 looses every time IMHO.

Don't want to play the devil's advocate, but I prefer the realtime rendering in Mudbox 2009 than in 3DCoat, talking about non VS sculpting.

This greyish look remind me the default normal map in 3DSmax viewport and is quite ugly imho.

Btw I prefer 3DCoat than MB2009 but that's a point that could be improved to make 3DCoat shinier.

[JamesE]

Don't want to play the devil's advocate, but I prefer the realtime rendering in Mudbox 2009 than in 3DCoat, talking about non VS sculpting.

This greyish look remind me the default normal map in 3DSmax viewport and is quite ugly imho.

Btw I prefer 3DCoat than MB2009 but that's a point that could be improved to make 3DCoat shinier.

Yeha once we get past all this voxel stuff and direct to bitmap painting on low rez meshes like what mudbox has I'd like to request a bit more focus on supporting better lighting and shaders when painting as well (sometime during 3.x cycle). I've seen enough from andrew to know that he will be fully capable of doing this, and doing it better and faster and definitely more stable and performance oriented than what I see in mudbox as well. I took a pass on upgrading to MB2009 after seeing how weak the painting support is. I've had awesome sculpting performance already for almost 2 years now in zb3 so that aspect of the upgrade did not appeal to me. I think 3dc will ultimately just replace my mudbox license, and probably my modo license altogether. I'm seriously considering not upgrading to CS4 either. This is for game production use too, not just my personal stuff.

[GED]

yeah I wasnt impressed with MB2009's elitist system requirements, they really arent doing their product any favours. I still really enjoy the feel of sculpting in Mudbox 1 and 2009 and the interface too. The 3D paint isnt really amazing in Mb2009 but a nice addition. Havent spent much time using 3dc to sculpt or paint or retopo so I cant really compare the apps properly but voxel sculpting is a clear winner for me.

[Doug B]

yeah I wasnt impressed with MB2009's elitist system requirements, they really arent doing their product any favours.

It's like they are really trying to severely limit their market that they already had for MB1. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!

It's one thing if they had a MB 2009 Elitist version that they charged fistfuls of cash to corporate clients. But then they should also have a version that could be used by most users who had a reasonably current PC-say 1-2 years old, 4Gb ram, a decent 512Mb video card; something like that at the least!

[JamesE]

It's like they are really trying to severely limit their market that they already had for MB1. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!

It's one thing if they had a MB 2009 Elitist version that they charged fistfuls of cash to corporate clients. But then they should also have a version that could be used by most users who had a reasonably current PC-say 1-2 years old, 4Gb ram, a decent 512Mb video card; something like that at the least!

Yeah that will be a deciding factor for upgrading too. MB2009 runs pretty poorly on my work system which isn't nearly as nice as my 64 bit home system - stability issues are another thing. We don't all get to run the latest, greatest hardware in the different areas of production - can't see that move being good for sales outside of studios as far as home users go either. It's got to be hard to compete against a product like zbrush that is much friendlier to most system configurations, and most of the user base hasn't even paid for an upgrade yet! I haven't given pixologic a dime for zbrush since I started using it at version 1.55b. That's a LONG TIME - more than 5 years now!

3DCoat is rapidly getting more and more of my time too when doing 3d work. It has become a valuable concepting tool not to mention becoming more and more useful in key areas like retopology, and texturing and only getting better with each release.