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Best 3d-coat workflow


Barracuda
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Hi Everyone

Just wanted to get different thoughts and ideas on workflows inside 3d coat, pros, and cons of different approaches.

so what is your workflow do you sculpt then retopo and then uv and start painting, or do you sculpt and paint and then retopo, uv and bake ur painting onto that, also I would like to ask if there are any tutorials for the smart materials layers and how to integrate that with the previous workflows.

Thanks in Advance

Regards

 

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Workflow that is 'best' of course depends on the work you are doing or what just naturally works best for you once you learn the tools. This is my standard workflow for all my models (I primarily focus on low poly modeling with high poly baked normal maps on them): 

 

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3 hours ago, Mystical said:

Workflow that is 'best' of course depends on the work you are doing or what just naturally works best for you once you learn the tools. This is my standard workflow for all my models (I primarily focus on low poly modeling with high poly baked normal maps on them): 

 

Thanks Mystical for your reply and your detailed description of your workflow in that thread, am quite new to 3D coat, but I have been doing 3D for a while now, used to be a softimage artist and now am looking into new tools and as Linux is my main platform Zbrush was out of the equation, and I don't use any Autodesk products no more, I am more interested in blocking then detailing my characters inside of 3D Coat and finish them up then decide if I want to export them or not, and do I want to go through the proccess of retopo and UVing, so my question would be if I start painting in 3D coat on a voxel or a surface model without retopo or present UVs would this creat problems later if I decied to do them after and transfer all the paint and textureing work I did?

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As soon as you start to paint on a voxel model, it is converted to a surface mode model, for your FYI. 

Painting directly on a surface mode model without a UV set needs a lot of polygons for any quality painting,  It needs millions as it is vertex based and not pixel based. 

The more vertexes you have the higher the quality of the paint applied. Also there is no available height painting in vertex mode.

The above does not mean it is wrong to paint vertex wise, just depends what your final product is to be used for and how it is viewed. 

I would recommend creating a simple object with enough polygons for the quality of the paint you need. Bake that to the paint room and see if you like the results. Then you will have an idea if it will work without spending too much time working through a complex model first.

Side Note: If you are just using very basic colors then you can have less polygons for the model in vertex painting. Sometimes users will paint base coats to get an concept idea of the final texturing, bake that to the paint room and work on top of that. 

Highest texture quality is generally always through baking first and having enough texture resolution. Also laying out your UV islands to use the most space available in the 0 and 1 UV space.

Edited by digman
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