Jump to content
3DCoat Forums

[Fixed] Passthrough Blending Mode or Blendmode - less Folder elements


Recommended Posts

  • Member

Hello,

despite my inital feelings I expressed in this thread shortly after coming from Substance Painter, after learning and using 3D Coat for some more time now, I gotta say, I am deeply in LOVE with its texturing. 

Seldom I came across a program that is so artist friendly and barrier free. I always dreamed about a Software like this, a painting Softwae with the feel and flexibility of a painting centric program like Krita, just in3D space.

That dream has come true for me with 3D Coat. After inital difficulties but then giving it another chance, which was one of the best decisions of my 3d artists life, I can't express the joy I get out of this hands on experience during the texutring process.

I could write a vast list of whats amazing about it, from simple things like being able to smooth my color instantly, insanely quickly adjust my layer blendings for glossness and height, the amazing preset functionality, the way you can freely use stencils for everything and combine it with brush options to get nice variation very quickly... to the amazing and fluid resource management which is such a pain in other popular software...the allmighty "E" panel, the list goes on....

It really feels like a true painting program on steriods in 3D space. I am mindblowing by it every day, the more I learn and use it. Really thankful for the hard work of the developers who I hereby like to thank from the heart for creating such a progam. It can offer me everything I was looking for in regards to painterly, much more hands on texturing experience that Substance Painter can't.

After I learned more 2D digital painting, I always missed that feeling of painting in texturing software. 3D Coat has it. It is quite an accomplishment for a software. The entire brush engine and feel is a whole nother beast in 3D coat than in other software and everyhting is really designed with the artist in mind. (e.g. having a color palette at your disposal at ALL times)

However, I am a long year Substance Painter user and quite profficent with the program. Recently I also learned Marmoset Toolbag 4 for texturing, which is also very nice and powerful.

There are some features that are standard in those programs that are missing in 3D Coat. If added to 3D Coat, the texturing aspects of it would skyrocket even further. It would be an unstoppable beast.

I understand that now with offering Textura as well, this would be a great opportunity to make it even more powerful and compete with the competitors. Many people are in search for alternatives to industry standard software right now, but many people also need a lot of those features from these softwares for production, workflow efficiency and non destructivness.

I want to keep my requests more atomic (I will make more requests in the future.), so I start with one of the most important missing features for me coming from Substance Painter:

Passthrough Blend Mode.

Passthrough Blend Mode is very important for layer organisation. It will not override the blend modes of its child layers, so that a layer group set to passthrough blend mode can act as a simple organizational container.

See it in action:

You notice here that when I use the passthrough blend mode, the child layers will have their blend modes active and behave as if they are not in a group. Whereas when using a group with any other blend mode, you can see that it will override any of the child blend modes. This is how it behaves also in 3D Coat, it is very inflexible for layer organisation. In 3D Coat, you can not have blend modes of children independent from the group.

It would seriously up the game of the layer stack in 3D Coat if this feature would be implemented. I am not sure how difficult this is, but from top of my head, it should be ""just"" that the group will simply ignore its own blend mode and have the layers act as if there where not in a group(?). It would be super useful to keep a more organized layer stack.

Furthermore, it would enable the use of adjustments! Non-destructively, I think. Because when using a pass through layer on a layer which is not a group, it will propagate its properties to the layers below. Allow me to demonstrate this as well: 

It is a bit different here, because 3D Coat does not have filters. But 3D Coat has the Color Operations tool, which is totally awesome, again, super nice hands on tool with much more artistic fine control than simple filters.

It already has the option "through all layers". So I guess if you would be able to use a "passtrough" layer on top of a layer stack, or on top in a group, you could use the color operations tool on that layer which would have no content, other than the color adjustments made with the tool.

Later on you could blend out these adjustments or even go to "textures->adjustments" to further alter the color operation result. I don't know if this makes sense. I know using external image editor with 3D Coat is quick and powerful, but this would be one more benefit of implementing passthrough layers for staying inside the software.

If either or both would be too much work and would need too much refactoring, or even conflict with how 3d coat is meant to be from a developers standpoint, then simply only having the addition of "container" elements in the layer stack would also already help and maybe even suffice. Simply "Folders" that can contain layers but have no influence on their blend modes, would be awesome.

This would really shine also if we could have the ability to select multiple layers at once and reorganize them into said folders.

 

 

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member

Yes, I also wish that this feature would be added.
In fact, this makes it almost impossible to group and manage painting layers in 3DC.

The result is completely different when it is a group layer and when it is not.

869717189_bandicam2021-11-0804-39-09-215copy.thumb.jpg.9cdbff8e68bc54f3787c9a0e72a027e3.jpg

Attach an example image.


I did it with the same color and blend option, but the result is different.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
  • Member

Yeah. The results will unfortunately always be different, cause when you build up 3 layers that use different blend modes, as soon as you toss them into a group, each of those layer's blend modes will be overridden by the parent blend mode, resulting in a vastly different appearance, basically destroying your previous work.

Like you said, this functionality is really essential for complex texturing projects. Substance Painter had this now for a very long time, so does Photoshop.

@Andrew Shpagin Is this considered in Development? It would really be a very needed functionality for layer organization in Coat/Textura to be more on par with Substance Painter's layer organization. I guess this is one of those things where people might still be (unfortunately) turned off by 3D Coat for heavy, non-destructive texturing work. (Well, this, and the lack of Black and white Masks)

I would go even further and say that there needs to be a change to the layer groups icons to make them more readable. Adding a folder icon before the name would suffice for this, just like it looks in PS.

In PS, the blending mode of the group is also automatically set to PassThrough on creation (ctrl+g), intelligently assuming that this is how the user would like to treat the group most of the time.

PassThrough-Goups.JPG

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Carlosan changed the title to [Request] Passthrough Blending Mode or Blendmode-less Folder elements
  • Carlosan changed the title to [Fixed] Passthrough Blending Mode or Blendmode - less Folder elements
  • Member
6 hours ago, Carlosan said:

3DCoat-2021-85
-> Pass-through blending mode for groups
 

That's jus Fantastic!

Thank you so much for listening and the insanely quick implementation!

This is a serious level up for 3D Coats and Texturas paint room. CongratZ!

I can see why 3D Coat has become and still becomes such an incredible program.

Seldom have I encountered programmers who understand artists needs so well and listen to functional feedback. Substance Painters rigidity and lack of certain features retain for years, without any reacton to the feedback of their users. They still don't even have lasso select tools. Still no Opacity via pen pressure, despite users ponding for around 6 years for it.

Here, I make a request, explain it well enough, and next thing you know it is implemented. Simply wonderful. I am speechless of joy.

Thank you @Andrew Shpaginand whoever is involved in the texturing code, thank you for all your efforts!

I so look forward to be able to properly use groups as organizational containers now when texturing in 3D Coat. And I think many other users will appreciate as well.

Edited by walter_sullivan
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

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.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...