3D Coat in Concept art - exporting and rendering

[Vykoukal]

Hello guys! I'm using 3D-Coat mainly for concept art and it feels really natural for me to work with. But I would need some advices from you guys. I'm usually creating large complex scenes with average level of details, then overpainting and detailing more in Photoshop. But I found almost impossible to export this detailed objects from 3D-Coat and trying to compose and render them since they are pretty polygon heavy. So is there any solution for rendering for instance a whole street of medieval town, with moderate level of details, some characters, etc.? I know that keyshot is capable of doing that, but I need some render engine where I would be able to set different types of light, hdri environment, maybe some fog, etc. 

Ideally to build whole scene with textures and paintings in 3D-Coat and than export it to some render engine or even render it somehow in 3D-Coat.

Thank you very much in advance. Every advice is very appreciated

[Carlosan]

Hi !

Possibility to plug external renders is in plans.

[Vykoukal]

Hi Carlosan, thank you for response. Is there any solution now? Like any standalone render engine which could handle this? Or even any other 3D program + render? So far I tried to put all elements in Modo, but it is not really capable of working with this dense models...

[AbnRanger]

Try a little experiment. Use one of your scenes to test...in the Sculpt Room, drag and drop each layer into the Models pallet. But first, you might want to go to the upper right part of the models pallet and click the drop list menu toggle > ADD NEW FOLDER > create a project folder for your scene. As you drag and drop (go to the right side of your layers and when you see the MOVE icon LMB + drag) your layers, you get a decimation dialog that lets you decimate the objects before storing. Test one > then click on it and apply it to a new layer, so you can inspect just how dense the mesh is and see if it kept enough detail. Toggle wireframe (VIEW Menu) to see if it is still too dense or did it reduce the model too much?

Once you have stored all your models into the models pallet, you can now import those into your render app. They are stored in "My Documents/3D Coat 4.7/Vox Stamps/Objects/Your new Subdirectory

Another option you can use to mitigate the poly density issue is to use Auto-Retopo as much as is feasible. It can do a pretty fantastic job if you try and reduce the complexity it has to handle, but breaking up complex models into logical parts. An AR-15 is a good example. If you threw just a high res version of it, as one complex part, Auto-Retopo will probably fail. But break it down into a handful of discrete parts and it will look amazing. You can buy used licenses of Modo pretty cheap, on their forum (in the Marketplace section). There probably isn't a better poly-modeling app out there, and it's render is very robust, even if it isn't as fast as a GPU renderer (Keyshot is a CPU only render, so it won't be a lot faster than Modo's). It has a nice volumetrics engine which can interactively render changes and adjustments, and it has OpenVDB support.

I've been a 3ds Max user for a long time, but am switching to Modo, myself. Like 3D Coat it has tabs for different workspaces/tool layouts. So, it has one for Rendering, just like 3D Coat does. Follow this workflow that is typical for 3D Scans and you should have nice, low poly models cranked out very quickly in many cases

 

[AbnRanger]

Blender is also a very good option and it's free. Cycles is a native GPU engine and Blender has a fairly nice set of volumetric tools. If I were a concept artist, I would first want to give Blender a solid try. You don't need to learn everything, just the UI, Cycles and materials. I would definitely give it a look before you invest hundreds of dollars in a render. Cycles is probably more than you'll ever need.

[Carlosan]

Alternatives:

VisualRender3D

Keyshot

Marmoset

[arumiat]

You want to check out Jama's work, he creates awesome polygon heavy scenes in 3DC which he then renders in Keyshot (which I realise isn't ideal for you, but he may have some tips). Could also potentially then adjust further in photoshop (which he does) http://jamajurabaev.com/#/miniatures/

http://jamajurabaev.com/#/world-war-ii/

Love that guy