New Member UsagiDev Posted September 6, 2021 New Member Report Share Posted September 6, 2021 Sooo yea I have used 3D Coat before and found it's focus to be too broad since it tries to do so many things that I have other, well working solutions for and I am only interested in painting my models. 3D Coat Textura's existence does seem to confirm that there are more people like me. So I gave it a shot since I always liked the brush engine supplied and lots of the actual painting features. My main style is handpainted 3d art and I am not really using normal mapping and most of the time not even roughness. So what's important to me is that very fundamental painting works and color picking, blending and such. I am posting this here because frankly your forums are a mess. Most pinned posts make it look like the forums might be dead because they are so old, some releases have their own posts... I have no idea where to post suggestions, feedback or bugs really. And since its more of a complete thing and I like your product I am making this post. Installation and Starting: The UI Scale Mystery Installation went smoothly, showing an option to start one specific version of 3d coat seems weird since you removed the other rendering mode anyways. Starting it up is more a hit in my face. I am using a 1440p display and the "auto" font setting made everything as big as possible apparently. Big, blurry interface barely any viewport. Digging around in the options and adjusting the font size to small made everything crisp and the window sizes all sensible. Another few seconds to pick a new ui font that isn't so pixelated and more readable and yay its much better than the last time I used 3D coat 4.x and there was no way around the ui feeling like it's from 2000. Big plus but I think it would be more sensible to have a ui scale slider, I wasn't expecting font size to adjust the whole ui and many others won't be either. Maybe even put in sensible defaults like 4k, 1440p 1080p as selectable options instead of small and so on since those words don't mean much when auto doesn't even tell me what the hell was picked. Viewport and Shaders Alright, finally I get to pick one of the demo scenes and play around with it. I am not a big fan of image based lighting but since there is flat shade mode and greyscale panorama this makes things a lot easier. Gotta be frank about the three top shading modes though.. they dont really tell me that much. They certainly don't reflect how my models look in unreal4 and handpainted... like what shading model is that? I don't know but I do know it has reflections. There should really be a shader panel where you can set this stuff up a little bit more individually and decide what kind of lighting reflection glossiness models you want. And when it comes to panorama I would greatly appreciate a secondary model that allows straight up a lightsource with angle and strength, shadow settings hard / soft shadows and strength + environment lighting as a hdr pickable color. Most simpler scene setups for handpainting use that sort and not image based lighting! Hotkeys Overall the painting experience was very good, it feels good to paint and while V isn't exactly the gold standard of pick color hotkeys it works. If it were up to me I would use X for symmetry and s for picking, used to s from blender.. but wait this surely has hotkey rebinding. Hmm save hotkeys.. load hotkeys.. where do I edit them? Maybe preferences? No. If you have a hotkey list I can edit I didn't find it and then I saw that you can bind hotkeys on the different tools when you mouseover. Except that the color picker actually activates the color picker tool and isn't the same as pressing v to color pick so that... is a little useless and weird. Might wanna look into a proper hotkey menu or if there actually is one put it where it makes sense. Brushtips, Brush Options and Falloff Blending colors is fun, really works nicely. Many of the stroke modes are very useful, curve stroke was the only one where the tooltip was actually needed. Falloff mode is simpler than I am used to from blender for example but it works well enough especially since the brush engine uses alpha textures to paint. So I tested creating new ones and I was pleasantly surprised about the create using curves feature. This reminded me about how the basic brush tips in krita are procedural and I caught myself thinking why you aren't using a procedural brush tip you can edit with a curve by default. Would seem like a more flexible choice and you could offer multiple kinds of brush tips, round and square and maybe some noise based ones. Trying to make a scatter brush to have some nice surface noise wasn't hard either, everything you could possible want to jitter is available, the menu just isn't very neat. Most other software has nice symbols and groupings or tabs for different features. So that might be something to make the software feel more polished! Input Fields On the matter of polish there is also the fact that clicking any scroll adjustable input field opens this super old not skinned input field with an ok button instead of just converting the display into an input that accepts on losing focus or enter. This feels weird and very unpolished. Freeze and Hide Time for some workflow testing, pretending to go about actually painting the model. First I would color everything in the base colors for whatever is needed there, or project a premade texture. For that I would normally make a mask in Substance Painter or a polygon selection in blender. So... first the hide tool since its the first one in the tool menu and because it took me a minute to realize freeze is masking. So what I expected is something like the selection tool in substance painter where I can pick if I want to mask a polygon, a model or a uv shell.. I think those were the options. I was very disappointed that this tool has no options and simply hides whatever the brush touches...making it utterly useless except maybe to hide something when you want to paint something inside another thing... but even then this is a mess. I have no idea what exactly the thoughts behind this tool are but I would suggest having modes of selection like I mentioned before! The freeze tool seemed more useful instantly because it makes it much easier to see what is frozen and what not... once again no options so I was just masking around and soon saw that it was using pen pressure to mask, and .. why isn't it deleting when I hold ctrl? Ohh it is with the mouse... ah I noticed that with pen pressure on for some reason it never actually unfreezes things! Switching pressure off fixes it and that is alright for most masking. And that is when it hit me that this is a paint brush like the others and I checked stroke modes out again. This is when I did find the last option, which looks similar to vertex lasso so I didn't understand it's a polygon select tool. Switching back to the hide tool... yea it works so that is one mystery solved about how to use this tool too. Yes it took me a lot more trying before I realized I could use the fill tool to freeze too, and that it lets me freeze uv shells. It would be easier to have options of what I want to freeze, like by uv shell or continuous mesh but it works so that was a huge relief for me because that makes things a lot easier than having to split meshes up into parts so I can fill them with color or textures. But I hope this section illustrates somewhat how strange it is that this is part of the fill tool and that the fill tool doesnt have hide as an options either. It would honestly be much better to handle masking like substance or photoshop. After giving it some thought the best solution I can think of for now is to have fill modes inside the stroke method instead of, or in addition to the fill tool. After seeing that polygon selection is there and this works for paint hide and freeze .. it would make so much more sense to also have a fill shell and fill model part option there for consistency. Layers I was surprised at first to find AO and Cavity layers and realized through them that you can bake them and its quite nice to use those to speed up some basic shading. But it also made me think about other tricks I use in Substance to speed up things. Like using position map masking to make a gradient from top to bottom or just paint on undersides. But that would also mean that you need a real masking system like photoshop and a proper layer stack interface. Because this really is barely functional. Opacity sliders are slow and unresponsive, groups have no icon that really tells you it's a group, you have to mouseover that little icon so drag and drop works. Clipping masks are hidden in the layer blending menu.. Overall it works but it seems like your dev team has never seen any other software that uses layers. Once again for a software package with years of development it just isn't polished in areas like this. Saving I was fully expecting the learning version to be unable to export and maybe safe but its nice that you can do both, watermarking is a pretty cool solution so you can still test the quality of export. What however baffles me is that the safe file has two files of the same name.. but different types. And that one of them as a jpg .. you are saving an actual screenshot of the program next to the save file. Like... why? And why is there no option to turn this off? This is the worst kind of file clutter I have seen and blender safes autosave files with the same name but different stacking extension names. But you can turn this off. Not so here. Maybe this sounds petty but think about this in a different scenario. Often you safe the art files for games within the engine content folders. Guess what kind of format gets auto converted by the likes of unreal and unity. If you were guessing JPG you guessed right. There are some workarounds but this is in my eyes a really cardinal sin. I even check out how loading works to see if you somehow want it so you can differentiate save files better... but you actually show both the actual save file and the jpg as loadables. Please leave it up to the user to turn this off and just manage how we want to differentiate between files ^-^ Bugs The only thins that I can safely say are bugs or at least I think are bugs were both uncovered when I tried the Curves / Spline paint tool. The first thing that didn't work was using the spacing checkbox, as soon as that is turned on nothing gets drawn at all, tried different settings. Next up I didn't find any way to delete the curves inside tool or curve options that actually worked. When I later tried to test it again in the same file the program basically crashed when I tried to apply a stroke on the curve. Something is really buggy there. First however I thought I might be doing something wrong, and since I saw earlier on the tooltips that you can press F1 to view a tutorial video I did that... but it opened a very old video of a different tool entirely. Conclusion A more light weight texturing only version of 3D Coat is exactly what I want, and the actual painting on models you have here is the best I know for handpainting hands down. Blender hasn't updated their texture painting once in years and substance painter's color picker and brush settings alone tell you everything you need to know about how much they though about people actually painting by hand and not with masks only. The pricing and buy options are fair. Polish is the one thing missing here and the only reason I will wait with a purchase. Knowing version 4.x of 3D Coat this shows a lot of improvement but it also shows that very major things went unaddressed for a LONG time. I like what I see and I want you guys to have success with your 2021 versions but honestly you got strong opponents and for me your hand painting is the strongest point. There are tons of options for realistic stuff but between you and blender there aren't a lot of options apart from going oldschool and painting your models in Photoshop instead of in 3D. Currently especially the file saving would really throw a wrench in my workflow and the bugs are a little concerning, overall the biggest weakpoint is the UI/UX design. Get this right and at least for me you have a long term customer. As is I am thinking about trying the rent to own option after my current project is done so the saving doesn't screw things over so badly.. best of luck and good work on this new version! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted September 6, 2021 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted September 6, 2021 I am not sure why some users keep clamoring for UI/UX changes when the 3DCoat Community (back in the V3 beta period) specifically asked for the UI to be patterned after PHOTOSHOP, which it was/is. Photoshop hasn't drastically changed it's UI layout in over 20yrs. Nor has 3ds Max, Maya, or C4D. They have made some small, cosmetic changes to the icons and that is about it. 3DCoat 2021 and Textura 2021 have had a revamped set of icons, like recent version of Max and Maya, and it has had a number of UI/UX enhancements....so, it really is sad to see such a huge effort on the part of the development team get NO recognition whatsoever for the work they did on the UI in this release. None. This was no small effort. Sure, there is more that can be done in terms of the layer panel and clip masks, etc...that is on the TO DO list for sure and will probably be the first major feature worked on, next. But, the UI work done in 2021 deserves at least a little credit. For one thing, the Activity Bar (which can be hidden in preferences if a user doesn't like it) has been added and it really becomes useful if an artist wants to toggle into the Minimalist UI. For those that still don't like the UI, just hit the TAB key to toggle into a UI with nothing but the model in the Viewport. For all the asset panels, one can either assign hotkeys to the ones used most and access them via hotkey and/or using the ACTIVITY BAR in the upper right corner of the UI. The SPACE bar will invoke all the Tools at any given time and a hotkey can be assigned to the PRESET Panel to use only the tools you want, when you want. It cannot get any more UI/UX friendly/cleaner than that. The Navigation Bar and Camera Menu is also hidden until the user moves their cursor close to it. In 3DCoat's Sculpt Workspace, there was a lot of work put into TOOL GROUPS (just like Photoshop has), to make the Tool Panel more streamlined and organized. In Voxel Mode, all the Surface Brushes were placed right under the Voxel Brushes, so it makes Voxel mode a true hybrid environment. There are some core, structural changes I would like to see in the Workspaces....to consolidate some of them...and I have asked Andrew for this a number of times. However, this and what some are asking for, are deep structural changes that will most certainly break a lot of things, and delay feature additions many have been asking for. Andrew has to weigh whether it is worth the development time, or if it is something to be visited down the road. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
New Member UsagiDev Posted September 7, 2021 Author New Member Report Share Posted September 7, 2021 I am very glad to see and hear that the forum and development is very much active. My goal here was to provide feedback, and while certainly many things might come down to personal taste these are still just my thoughts fresh going in to this version of 3DCoat Textura and like I documented the first impression is less than stellar on the ui in general - and as far as comparison to the last time I tried 3D Coat the only difference that I could actually spot was that I was able to fix the ui scaling and readability. It's true that other software didn't update their ui drastically in recent years but they are also miles ahead when it comes to that. I simply cannot say if there was any huge effort and while yea I think it's harsh to read it's also in my opinion import to understand that new users will compare this software to similarly priced ones. Those small differences you mention are what makes or breaks interfaces. I have added a picture that directly compares layer and brush options to illustrate this. Both are functional but its super clear that 3D Coat lacks visual structure and good dropdowns / input fields. PS is more readable while being smaller because it uses depth and contrast to differentiate between lines. I am not attacking the devs here, I simply try to communicate what is missing to make this feel as polished as the competition. The whole top bar and the navigation / viewport / camera options are great which is why I didn't really address them. The stroke mode panel is equally nice especially when you open it with the hotkey. The activity bar is something I didn't notice at all and I tested it out after your post. So I simply closed all down with tab and wanted to go to work. Had to fiddle around a bit till I noticed that b is color pallet and not color.. menu. To actually use it at all I decided to use smart materials and different brushes. Selecting these quickly from up there is actually hand, but creating brushes up there is definitely not so useful, its just very fiddly when its even smaller than in the open panels. The idea is great and I have to experiment more with it, but I also feel like layers are too essential not to have open at all times. It is good to have more options though! The space bar menu is another thing that I did not know about, however I noticed that the tool icons have a highlight but on most of the icons its barely visible. The background under the tool you would select could go fully opaque - that could make it better to see. I also expected it to work like other radial menus I know so it is open while I hold space and confirms my selection when I let go of the spacebar but instead I instantly closed the menu a couple times before I had it down. Its much faster with a pen to hold space, drag the pen in the direction of the tool and let go as soon as the angle is right and the icon highlighs compared to activating it with space and clicking on the icon. A change like that and preferences to change order / which tools are actually in there would probably be a lot more handy compared to the activity bar at least for painting. For the rest of what you mentioned I cannot say a word to it since I literally only got 3DCoat Textura, and thus no sculp or voxel workspace! Thanks for engaging with me at all Ranger, and for mentioning some features I really didn't see at all. I would like to stress again that I want 3D Coat Textura to succeed, and don't think for a second that I am not just as quick to dish out harsh feedback about any other software I use when something doesn't add up for me. I want 3D Coat Textura to be my go to texturing software 2022 and its not a massive list of stuff that I think really needs to be done. Layers and menus are all usable, I just mentioned them because they don't look as polished as the competition. For me the key points are: one save file preferably with a 3dcoat icon without any screenshots or other shenanigans fill / freeze / hide tool consistency layer opacity slider responsiveness dark color for the 3dcoat window header I actually found out that you CAN change the V hotkey but its hidden in Windows/Panels of all things, only reason I found out is because I thought hey.. color pallet is probably a panel so maybe I can get that onto C. So yay another thing that actually has a workaround for me. Think of me as petty if you want, but I did buy a version of 3D Coat 4 and I plan to get 3DCoat Textura so I want to voice my opinion and hope that it can help make the software better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member sprayer Posted September 7, 2021 Advanced Member Report Share Posted September 7, 2021 8 hours ago, AbnRanger said: Nor has 3ds Max No autodesk slowly remaking whole UI on modern QT. To me 3dcoat UI looks a bit slowly response, also it have many bugs what Andrew do not want to fix. There are also many small bugs, with extra clicks, with shifts of tips and windows. Just an example in texture editor window you need 3 or more clicks on wireframe button to toggle Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew Shpagin Posted September 13, 2021 Report Share Posted September 13, 2021 Thanks for good feedback, gradually we will implement. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.