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3DCoat 2021 vs. Substance Painter 2021


Artomiano
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Some time ago there was a similar thread. But it's months before. So let me ask today: What do you think? Could 3DCoat's painting and texturing capabilities replace Substance Painter? For me it's not easy to answer because I didn't work with both of them but plan to use it in the next months. So ... what decision could be best for the start? Yes, Substance is (still) the industry standard for 3d texturing / painting. But as far as I know 3DCoat has been raised its painting features. But I didn't found any article of "real world experience" with the newest versions of both software parts.

What do I plan to do? Primarly texturing / painting 3D models and UV mapping.

This question means ONLY the texturing / painting  / uv capabilites!

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I'll share my 2 cents here. I think for hand-painting your textures, 3DCoat is still the better tool. It works much more like Photoshop and isn't as confusing in my opinion to just apply some paint. You have a lot of control over your brushes and the smart materials are really good (though the default library is lacking). 3DCoat also has vastly superior UV capabilities - I think currently Substance Painter is only doing Auto-unwrapping which works for some cases but isn't near as flexible as the tools you get from 3DCoat.

However, Substance has a lot of things going for it as well. For one, it's a much more popular tool, so tutorials, materials, brushes, masks, etc. are much easier to find for Substance than for 3DCoat. Go search Gumroad or Artstation for "Substance" or "3DCoat" and you'll see what I mean. It also does dynamic masking better than 3DCoat. You can apply a layer and then adjust it's mask through sliders for instance. 3DCoat has similar features, but it's going to be a destructive workflow, where Substance is much more non-destructive (maybe someone can share a better workflow for this in 3DCoat).

I know you mentioned you are only looking at the painting/UV features, but obviously 3DCoat is the better value proposition. You get a lot of great modeling, sculpting, retopo, etc. tools that you wouldn't get with Substance.

In the end I'm taking the Substance route for myself - I don't need the other capabilities offered by 3DCoat and don't typically hand paint my models, so I'm actually selling my 3DCoat license. If you end up looking at buying 3DCoat let me know, currently selling much cheaper than here on the website.

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8 minutes ago, utopius said:

I'll share my 2 cents here. I think for hand-painting your textures, 3DCoat is still the better tool. It works much more like Photoshop and isn't as confusing in my opinion to just apply some paint. You have a lot of control over your brushes and the smart materials are really good (though the default library is lacking). 3DCoat also has vastly superior UV capabilities - I think currently Substance Painter is only doing Auto-unwrapping which works for some cases but isn't near as flexible as the tools you get from 3DCoat.

However, Substance has a lot of things going for it as well. For one, it's a much more popular tool, so tutorials, materials, brushes, masks, etc. are much easier to find for Substance than for 3DCoat. Go search Gumroad or Artstation for "Substance" or "3DCoat" and you'll see what I mean. It also does dynamic masking better than 3DCoat. You can apply a layer and then adjust it's mask through sliders for instance. 3DCoat has similar features, but it's going to be a destructive workflow, where Substance is much more non-destructive (maybe someone can share a better workflow for this in 3DCoat).

I know you mentioned you are only looking at the painting/UV features, but obviously 3DCoat is the better value proposition. You get a lot of great modeling, sculpting, retopo, etc. tools that you wouldn't get with Substance.

In the end I'm taking the Substance route for myself - I don't need the other capabilities offered by 3DCoat and don't typically hand paint my models, so I'm actually selling my 3DCoat license. If you end up looking at buying 3DCoat let me know, currently selling much cheaper than here on the website.

Thanks for your thoughts. I already own a 3DCoat license. So there is no need. ;) Problem is ... I own it since about two years or so. Sometimes I tried to dive into 3DCoat but it happend everytime that I struggle with its UI and "how the things to be done". So I waited months because the new announced version (now 2021) should contain many many improvments. So I think about to give it another chance. ;)

But ... I'm not sure if I can go with it. The UI is widely the same. So ... maybe I come up better with ZBrush's UI. No clue. :unknw: It's a difficult thing for me.

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2 minutes ago, Artomiano said:

Thanks for your thoughts. I already own a 3DCoat license. So there is no need. ;) Problem is ... I own it since about two years or so. Sometimes I tried to dive into 3DCoat but it happend everytime that I struggle with its UI and "how the things to be done". So I waited months because the new announced version (now 2021) should contain many many improvments. So I think about to give it another chance. ;)

But ... I'm not sure if I can go with it. The UI is widely the same. So ... maybe I come up better with ZBrush's UI. No clue. :unknw: It's a difficult thing for me.

I agree that the UI is confusing, it took me a long time to feel comfortable there coming from Blender - though I think 2021 does help a bit in this area. It's more clean, and the rooms are more distinct from each other I feel. ZBrush's UI is probably worse, but I think you can get used to just about any UI if you work with it long enough.

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9 minutes ago, utopius said:

ZBrush's UI is probably worse, but I think you can get used to just about any UI if you work with it long enough.

Hm ... don't know. ZBrush is an industry standard, so I assumed that its user experience could be better. But that's a theory. ;)

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1 hour ago, Artomiano said:

Hm ... don't know. ZBrush is an industry standard, so I assumed that its user experience could be better. But that's a theory. ;)

Haha, I think ZBrush is industry standard for it's sculpting capabilities, but the GUI is a long shot from something like Maya or Modo, both of which I consider to be fairly intuitive GUIs :).

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Hm ... yesterday I found this:

Quote

3DCoatTextura is a tailored version of 3DCoat 2021 which has all its professional tools for 3D Painting/Texturing and Rendering at a more affordable price. In simple terms 3DCoatTextura is a special version of 3DCoat which has all its Painting/Texturing and Rendering capabilities. It is designed especially for people who create 3D models in other software and need a professional tool for Painting/Texturing at a very sweet price

@Andrew Shpagin Does it mean, that 3DCoat now is sooo encouraged that it will compete any other 3D painting software like Substance Painter or the integrated "paint tool" in ZBrush? Are 3DCoat's painting and uv tools at last - matured? :vava: That would be  ... very interesting.

Edited by Artomiano
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Very good question.   One of my closer known creator friends uses substance painter, and I was wondering what the major differences are between the two programs.  I've only experienced 3D Coat, as my first 3D texture painting system.  Haven't tried both, because substance painter is a little more expensive, and I probably should try harder and spend more time working with the tools I already have.

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On 6/29/2021 at 1:43 PM, Artomiano said:

Hm ... don't know. ZBrush is an industry standard, so I assumed that its user experience could be better. But that's a theory. ;)

The problem with Zbrush is that it started out in an odd manner. Instead of directly trying to be a simple 3D digital sculpting program it started out as this weird hybrid; a 3D/2.5D program that at the time boasted of being the next evolution into a kind of  2.5D Photoshop. This was based around the idea of PIXOLS. The idea was that you sculpted stuff in 3D then went into 2.5D mode and composited your now fixed objects into a 2D plane that still allowed for changes in lighting and illumination. This had the potential at the time of being very powerful as you could assemble scenes that were huge with great complexity even though the angle of view was now fixed. I may be wrong but my impression was that the development team was deeply influenced by their resident artist, Meats Meier. 

What ended up transpiring was that everyone piled in for the 3D sculpting tools and ignored the 2.5D stuff. It simply never caught on and over the years, well now decades the 3D sculpting tools rapidly grew in power but the 2.5D Pixol stuff just faded into the background. The problem was that the 2.5D pixol stuff made the interface needlessly complex and annoying for those that didn't understand all the extra stuff you had to do because of it. I knew all about this and even I would get enraged at say inadvertantly turning my sculpt into a 2.5D Pixol object that was fixed in space and not being able to immediately Ctrl Z my way back out of it.  Of course you could just CTRL N to ditch the Pixol transformed sculpt then drop a fresh version of your sculpt sitting in the stack, BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY? It also meant that there were 3 distinct ways to save your work in Zbrush; ZTL, ZDOC and ZPR (Z tool, Z Document, and Z Project)

 

Here,  learn all about it. Try not to puke on your keyboard. That's hard to clean up.

  The whole 2.5D thing seemed to encourage the pictorial horror vacui of Meat's Meier's style, or psychological mindset. 

GBAXOHb.jpg

So the end result was a needlessly complex interface with a lot of extra clicking and a requisite  awareness of whys and wherefores of it all. Like Utopius said you can get used to it, and I have, but still it's vexatious when you're learning the interface and trying to learn say human and animal anatomy at the same time. 

It's one of the main reasons I prefer 3D Coat to Zbrush; 3D Coat is simply easier to learn to operate and more straightforward in getting you to where you want to go, if sculpting is where you want to go and not some elaborate and esoteric compositing with billions of Pixols (and even with  2003 computers Zbrush could deliver billions of Pixols, I'll give it that).

Having said that there's some things in Zbrush I wish Andrew would incorporate soon into 3D coat, like a proper sculpt room lighting system instead of unwieldly and ineffective lighting system he has now.  A powerful lighting studio in the Sculpt Room is simply indispensable to serious sculpting. In fact it would be nice if it were more akin to Maya's lighting system than even Zbrush's system which really is a bit annoying by comparison to Maya with that tiny little ball and those tiny little lightbulb icons  with all the obscure little sliders. Everything in  Zbrush's interface is so fidgety and tiny...eecch.

 

Edited by L'Ancien Regime
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12 hours ago, L'Ancien Regime said:

The problem with Zbrush is that it started out in an odd manner. Instead of directly trying to be a simple 3D digital sculpting program it started out as this weird hybrid; a 3D/2.5D program that at the time boasted of being the next evolution into a kind of  2.5D Photoshop. This was based around the idea of PIXOLS. The idea was that you sculpted stuff in 3D then went into 2.5D mode and composited your now fixed objects into a 2D plane that still allowed for changes in lighting and illumination. This had the potential at the time of being very powerful as you could assemble scenes that were huge with great complexity even though the angle of view was now fixed. I may be wrong but my impression was that the development team was deeply influenced by their resident artist, Meats Meier. 

What ended up transpiring was that everyone piled in for the 3D sculpting tools and ignored the 2.5D stuff. It simply never caught on and over the years, well now decades the 3D sculpting tools rapidly grew in power but the 2.5D Pixol stuff just faded into the background. The problem was that the 2.5D pixol stuff made the interface needlessly complex and annoying for those that didn't understand all the extra stuff you had to do because of it. I knew all about this and even I would get enraged at say inadvertantly turning my sculpt into a 2.5D Pixol object that was fixed in space and not being able to immediately Ctrl Z my way back out of it.  Of course you could just CTRL N to ditch the Pixol transformed sculpt then drop a fresh version of your sculpt sitting in the stack, BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY? It also meant that there were 3 distinct ways to save your work in Zbrush; ZTL, ZDOC and ZPR (Z tool, Z Document, and Z Project)

* * *

Here,  learn all about it. Try not to puke on your keyboard. That's hard to clean up.

  The whole 2.5D thing seemed to encourage the pictorial horror vacui of Meat's Meier's style, or psychological mindset. 

* * *

So the end result was a needlessly complex interface with a lot of extra clicking and a requisite  awareness of whys and wherefores of it all. Like Utopius said you can get used to it, and I have, but still it's vexatious when you're learning the interface and trying to learn say human and animal anatomy at the same time. 

It's one of the main reasons I prefer 3D Coat to Zbrush; 3D Coat is simply easier to learn to operate and more straightforward in getting you to where you want to go, if sculpting is where you want to go and not some elaborate and esoteric compositing with billions of Pixols (and even with  2003 computers Zbrush could deliver billions of Pixols, I'll give it that).

Having said that there's some things in Zbrush I wish Andrew would incorporate soon into 3D coat, like a proper sculpt room lighting system instead of unwieldly and ineffective lighting system he has now.  A powerful lighting studio in the Sculpt Room is simply indispensable to serious sculpting. In fact it would be nice if it were more akin to Maya's lighting system than even Zbrush's system which really is a bit annoying by comparison to Maya with that tiny little ball and those tiny little lightbulb icons  with all the obscure little sliders. Everything in  Zbrush's interface is so fidgety and tiny...eecch.

 

Hi @L'Ancien Regime

thanks for your opinion and your experiences. That's very important and helpful to me. Ah - and thanks to your little historical backflip ... didn't know.
What bothers me is the workflow (and so in partially the UI) of 3DCoat. I'm coming from Photoshop & Co. The "new" workflow in 3DCoat is - for me - very strange. I wish there would be tutorials on "how to make a workflow transition from photoshop to 3dcoat" or so. ;) Substance has layers and ZBrush too - and they work "similar" like Photoshop's. But 3DCoat's layers work in a different way - and vary from room to room - as far as I understand it. You can not easily turn off/on layers, group them, lock them and so on. I watched the following video for this:

It's ... not very handy. ;)
When it comes to painting and texturing, I would have the freedom to switch between layers - "play" with them (visibility, group, lock, change order for effects and so on). Is this now possible in 2021? Layers in Substance Painter makes it similar (not equal but similar).

So ... it's not only a question "ZBrush or 3DCoat" but "ZBrush or Substance Painter or 3DCoat".
Remember: This thread primarly contains the big question: "What's better for painting/texturing?" I know there are many other tools in 3DCoat - but that's not the actual theme of this discussion. ;)

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1 hour ago, Artomiano said:

Hi @L'Ancien Regime

thanks for your opinion and your experiences. That's very important and helpful to me. Ah - and thanks to your little historical backflip ... didn't know.
What bothers me is the workflow (and so in partially the UI) of 3DCoat. I'm coming from Photoshop & Co. The "new" workflow in 3DCoat is - for me - very strange. I wish there would be tutorials on "how to make a workflow transition from photoshop to 3dcoat" or so. ;) Substance has layers and ZBrush too - and they work "similar" like Photoshop's. But 3DCoat's layers work in a different way - and vary from room to room - as far as I understand it. You can not easily turn off/on layers, group them, lock them and so on. I watched the following video for this:

It's ... not very handy. ;)
When it comes to painting and texturing, I would have the freedom to switch between layers - "play" with them (visibility, group, lock, change order for effects and so on). Is this now possible in 2021? Layers in Substance Painter makes it similar (not equal but similar).

So ... it's not only a question "ZBrush or 3DCoat" but "ZBrush or Substance Painter or 3DCoat".
Remember: This thread primarly contains the big question: "What's better for painting/texturing?" I know there are many other tools in 3DCoat - but that's not the actual theme of this discussion. ;)

Please look at this 

 

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31 minutes ago, stas3dc said:

Please look at this 

 

Aaahhh. Thanks for the tip. Problem was, the layer system in the sculpt room is not the same like in the paint room so I had to take a closer look to achive similar "layering results". Okay so far. It works. But ... nevertheless ... that every room has its "own" layer subsystem is complicated. :(

 

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24 minutes ago, Artomiano said:

Aaahhh. Thanks for the tip. Problem was, the layer system in the sculpt room is not the same like in the paint room so I had to take a closer look to achive similar "layering results". Okay so far. It works. But ... nevertheless ... that every room has its "own" layer subsystem is complicated. :(

 

That doesn't trouble me too much because the different rooms are such different beasts that require their own approaches. I've been playing with Zbrush Zmodeler and I haven't really looked at the new polygonal modeling tools yet for 3D Coat. So in that room I'm just as much of a novice as you; I don't know what I'll find there, if it's going to be useful to me or not but I'm going to give a good effort to learn it just to see what's there. Who knows?

Personally I struggled with texturing, trying many solutions and for UV mapping (back when I tried to do UV mapping in Maya it was so bad it turned me off totally) and then when I discovered UV mapping and texture painting in 3D Coat it was an amazing liberation for me. I prefer it to Mari; it's more visceral and sensuous to handle less abstract and detached. And it's less of a click fest than Zbrush so it's more direct and simple to use though for someone learning it that may seem hard to believe. Stick with it, and keep working with it. When you master it you'll find a lot of enjoyment in it. Is it perfect? Do I wish it was better, easier? yeah I do but maybe that's my own failings. It's a miracle to me that I even have this supercomputer on my desk and I can sculpt and paint with it at all...

svbiJhp.jpg

puflrQE.jpg

 

Edited by L'Ancien Regime
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On 6/30/2021 at 2:06 AM, Artomiano said:

Hm ... yesterday I found this:

@Andrew Shpagin Does it mean, that 3DCoat now is sooo encouraged that it will compete any other 3D painting software like Substance Painter or the integrated "paint tool" in ZBrush? Are 3DCoat's painting and uv tools at last - matured? :vava: That would be  ... very interesting.

3DCoat started out as a 3D Texture Painting tool and V3 had a completely new UI which was largely designed to be incredibly familiar with Photoshop and there is a high degree of interoperability between both...in fact, you can simply hit CTRL + P to send the current layers to Photoshop and CTRL + S (from within PS) to send the result back to 3DCoat. It's just that easy. 

So, when someone asks if 3DCoat's painting tools are mature,  it's important to note that 3DCoat was texture painting years before Substance Painter came along and was way ahead for a number of years afterward, in areas like having larger texture sizes, performance, real displacement in the viewport, top notch UV editing/unfolding tools, VERTEX PAINT....which is absolutely awesome in 3DCoat, as it allows an artist to do things that neither Substance Painter or ZBrush can do...use a Smart Material on a high polygon mesh, to both Sculpt and Texture Paint in a single stroke. So, let's say you have a dense object like a Stone Bridge, you are modeling/sculpting...if you have a good Cobblestone Smart Material, you can use that to paint and sculpt with the same brush stroke or single click with the FILL tool (Paint Room). One can go back and dial the depth up or down in the layer panel, or modify it locally with a brush, using the MAGNIFY-REDUCTION brush. 

You can also add additional tessellation to the entire object  (or locally with Dynamic Subdivision functionality in the new Surface Brush engine, after painting/sculpting with Vertex Paint...if you suddenly decide you need more resolution in a specific area. You can even add Booleans after the fact, and it will not break Sculpt Layer functionality, and only 3DCoat has this. 

With all of that said, yes, the layer system in Substance is ahead of 3DCoat and it's a shame because this was something Andrew was intent on working on a 3-4yrs ago....but someone convinced him to create some offshoot versions of 3DCoat, such as the 3DCoat Modding Tool and 3DC Printing. Development in 3DCoat is also spread across the entire app, so there is not a continuous focus on the Painting tools like Substance Painter does....because that is all they do. Maybe this will change if 3DC 2021 is successful enough. Nevertheless, the brush performance has quietly improved 2x or more, because of some optimizations in the code, and it is quite noticeable. A new GPU brush engine has also been in development for a while and is near a state of release. 

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3 hours ago, Artomiano said:

Hi @L'Ancien Regime

thanks for your opinion and your experiences. That's very important and helpful to me. Ah - and thanks to your little historical backflip ... didn't know.
What bothers me is the workflow (and so in partially the UI) of 3DCoat. I'm coming from Photoshop & Co. The "new" workflow in 3DCoat is - for me - very strange. I wish there would be tutorials on "how to make a workflow transition from photoshop to 3dcoat" or so. ;) Substance has layers and ZBrush too - and they work "similar" like Photoshop's. But 3DCoat's layers work in a different way - and vary from room to room - as far as I understand it. You can not easily turn off/on layers, group them, lock them and so on. I watched the following video for this:

It's ... not very handy. ;)
When it comes to painting and texturing, I would have the freedom to switch between layers - "play" with them (visibility, group, lock, change order for effects and so on). Is this now possible in 2021? Layers in Substance Painter makes it similar (not equal but similar).

So ... it's not only a question "ZBrush or 3DCoat" but "ZBrush or Substance Painter or 3DCoat".
Remember: This thread primarly contains the big question: "What's better for painting/texturing?" I know there are many other tools in 3DCoat - but that's not the actual theme of this discussion. ;)

You have to understand that the SCULPT TREE is as the name implies....a Hierarchy TREE. It is not a layer system like Photoshop. However, in the default Sculpt Workspace, there IS a Layer Panel....and it is the very same one in the Paint Workspace. Why? Because of Sculpt Layers. It's as simple as that. Paint Layers in 3DCoat always involved 3 main channels (plus a Metalness Channel)...COLOR, ROUGHNESS/GLOSSINESS, DEPTH. Instead of having yet another panel just for Sculpt Layers, Andrew kept it all integrated in the (Paint) Layer Panel, so that it works the same if you are working on a Low Poly, UV-Mapped PAINT OBJECT or a SCULPT OBJECT. Depth information is stored the same way on both Object types. The Layer System is very similar to Photoshop's, except for the lack of thumbnails you see for color and masking. Hopefully Andrew will add this after the release of 2021.

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Substance Painter is now part of the Adobe family. So that solves it for me. 3DC all the way. I already give Adobe too much money for the privilege of renting Lightroom and Photoshop. 3DC 2021 and ArtRage (2D painting) are the two best bargains for digital artists... 

3DC 2021 is incredible and I had no problems putting down my money for the best deal of the year!!!!!

 

Edited by kenmo
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There is another angle to consider now. Adobe just released a free substance addon for Blender, which lets you use sbar files in Blender. Mix that with Blender's painting features/addons and you can have an alternative version of Substance Painter in Blender, for free.

What 3D Coat really needs is a take on the dynamic texturing and masking that can be found in mixer/painter (in contrast, they lack the good painting tools 3DC offers). If Andrew could create a dynamic substance file (sbar) alternative ("coats"?) for 3D Coat, which can be used in DCC apps and game engines, that would make it the most well rounded texturing application.

 

Edited by RabenWulf
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44 minutes ago, Carlosan said:

Yes thanks, both task are in the todo list.

Note: only addon is free. Subscription to get sbar files is not.

The nice thing about sbsar files is that they are very popular so you can get them from a lot of sources like gumroad for example. With that and the free plugin you have what you need

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2 hours ago, Carlosan said:

Yes thanks, both task are in the todo list.

Note: only addon is free. Subscription to get sbar files is not.

Good to know. Look forward to seeing some updates on that in the future.
As for the sbar files, many can be found free floating around the internet as anyone can produce them with Substance Designer. Plenty of material libraries to pull from at this point.
 

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7 hours ago, RabenWulf said:

alternative

There is already node editor in 3d coat -_- but need a bit polish and docs

2 hours ago, Artomiano said:

very popular

if they are popular it doesn’t mean that they are good, we using 3dcoat instead zbrush, you know why, adobe products all is pain because they are popular, i am dreaming to leave photoshop, that's insane you cannot reassign pan tool to middle mouse like all software have, they add cntl+z in last year, just think about it photoshop do not support EXR files it cannot save 32bit file full float, people asking about that many years on forum, you need to install plugins to work with exr. And what about illustrator and other program... ALigoritmic also make not very comfortable software for example for making tiling textures it's the same like zbrush)) compare to pixplant

Edited by sprayer
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