Workflow and other General Questions (before Trial)

[l23d]

Hi everyone- hoping you could help out with a few questions I had considering this tool. Unfortunately I don't have a clear schedule to give the trial license a solid try yet but that will be the next step for me here. I've watched a good share of YouTube tutorials but still have some questions:

1) Is there a decent library of built-in materials / shaders included with 3D Coat for 3D painting?

I see a bunch in tutorials I watch but wasn't sure if they are there from the get go and not custom libraries people developed

2) What does the workflow look like for UV Unwrapping & Painting a rigged/animated character ?

Currently I'm using Blender end to end for modeling, UV unwrap, texturing, rigging, animation and exporting to Unity.

That's been my process for the last couple years and it's always worked, but I feel like the UV unwrapping and texture painting is a pain and wanted to start exploring alternate options. I'm self taught here so 0 experience in professional industry.

I'm hoping I could use a tool like 3D coat to replace some of my UV unwrapping and texturing (3D Painting) process. 

My confusion I guess is when is the best state of the workflow to bring in the model to 3D Coat?

There's two approaches I can think of:

1) From Blender export a rigged, untextured model and then bring that into 3D Coat for unwrap/texture, and export straight to Unity

2) Export initial model from Blender, export to 3D coat, unwrap & texture, import back into Blender for rigging and animation 

How is this typically done? All the tutorials I've seen so far have been for mostly hard surface/inanimate objects .

Part of my confusion is probably from the fact I'm just ignorant of what will break the links to my animations (would unwrapping destroy them, etc). If I have to unwrap in Blender and just 3D Paint in 3D Coat, that's probably OK too, but I keep hearing how great the unwrap in 3D Coat is so I'd like to take advantage if I could.

3) PBR Materials - am I correct in that 3D coat supports them ("Smart Materials") but cannot create them? Or is there a way to create and save them within 3D Coat?

If anyone knows of tutorials for a rigged character and Smart Materials I'd be interested to watch those before attempting a trial. I'm interested in what the tool can do- there are other niche use cases like sculpting which I do from time to time, and retopology which I know I would use occasionally.

Appreciate any info

 

[Carlosan]

Hi !

1) You can find a library of materials a our PBR scan store.

2) Point 2 is the common way. 3DC does not support rig import.

 

Hope this help

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This video is an overview of 3DCoat's PBR Scanned Materials Store, as well as the installation of the files downloaded, and usage of the materials in 3DCoat.

 

 

[ryivhnn]

I got 3dC precisely because I hated uv unwrapping and retopo in Blender XD (the sculpting was a massive bonus at the time but I think Blender 2.8 dynatopo/remesh is much better than my current version of 3dC which is behind because Linux, unfortunately its ability to handle millions of polys while better than Blender 2.79 is still nowhere near even my current version of 3dC)

Still learning myself but so far I've found it easier to do rigging before texturing if for no other reason than you should have all mesh issues sorted out.  I tried doing texturing first with my current character and ended up spending a LOT of time being grateful for the fact you can bake onto completely different meshes with 3dC as I had to change the mesh quite a few times to soothe my over the top perfectionism fix a few tiny little niggly issues with edge loops and whatnot.  And animate dead last after happy with all texturing and rigging XD