3D-Coat vs Substance Painter for vehicles and other hard surface models

[tiburbage]

After much not very helpful/informative Google'ing, and reading Polycount etc. posts, I haven't yet read any really good, objective comparisons of using 3D-Coat's texturing and baking toolsets as opposed to taking the model into Substance Painter. I was hoping (Don, Carlosan, others) might have some useful comments, or links to info you think helps to shed light on this. About as far as many related posts go is to say "3D Coat is great for hand painted texturing", but that isn't very helpful in understanding how the two actually compare for doing realistic hard surface model texturing. My work is almost all in hard surface, though also includes other "environmental artist" more organic objectives like foliage, rocks, etc. etc.

I'm hoping there are some forum frequenters here who do hard surface realistic texturing work at a professional level, are familiar with Painter, but have chosen to do the work in 3DC instead.

The news that 3DC is incorporating support for Megascans is great, and is certainly a differentiator from Substance, especially for those of us aiming our work in an Unreal Engine pipeline.

I should point out I'm already a 3DC license holder, and plan to upgrade, so I don't need to be sold on the feature set outside of texturing.

TIA

 

[geo_n]

Last time I tried painter it couldn't paint over different uvmaps at the same time. I had to select the uvmap before I could paint on it. Maybe things have changed since.
I don't really see specific tools in both appz that would give you an edge over hard surface texture painting. Projecting photoreal textures and handpainting them is a very generic task. I use 3dcoat because it performs better than painter on low end laptops. Painter was sluggish.

[Skye]

@geo_n Last SP update allows to paint over texture sets

 

 

@tiburbage Substance painter is better for texture work. You have a ton of generators that can generate various noises and masks instantly and everything is stored in layers so you can change it any time. 3Dc doesn't have that, only attaching smart material to layer but that's not much and it does not work awlays and its laggy.

But substance is missing couple of things like pen tool or some custom selections like vertex lines or closed curves, that you can use to paint. SP is missing as well a feature if you have multiple objects in scene you cannot turn them of or on if you want to separate them, you need to either duplicate them and do exploded view or add opacity layer to hide them. 3Dcoat has painted objects list where you can turn off or on any separate mesh in scene.

[tiburbage]

Thanks for the bit of feedback so far. Would still like to hear from pro game or vfx artists who can use whatever they want to, but have chosen 3DC for realistic texturing. Interesting aspects include baking capabilities, especially tangent space normal maps, ability for smart materials to use mesh maps, support for MatID masks, ability to procedurally generate and visualize a ray projection cage, anything else about the process which is non-destructive. I'm not as concerned about mesh map baking because I'm considering purchasing the very highly regarded Marmoset Toolbag specifically for baking, so it really boils down to the the texturing part.

@Skye You mention generators. Does 3DC not have tileable procedural noise generators? Can't 3DC Smart Materials leverage mesh maps like position, cavity, curvature, AO?

Edited November 8, 2020 by tiburbage