An atlas painted on 3DCoat by Vexod

[Carlosan]

author site

- Vexod14: An atlas painted on 3DCoat. Always fun to color things on this gem

- Vexod14: Experimenting with handpainting normalmap in Coat. I wish I tested this earlier. It's so cool !!

- 45cend: Hey there! Looks cool! Are you achieving this by color sampling the normal colours or there is something else?

- Vexod14: I modeled that "as normalmap" (just lighting a viewport with appropriate directional lights)

Then I made a few models to get a picking normal image and used that in 3DCoat color picker to paint over the normalmap layer.

the image itself (tga attached): 

(here's a jpeg preview but rather use the TGA above as it's a non-compressed image, you'll have better pixel values)

The goal is to have most common angles to handpaint maps or alter baked ones

In 3DCoat just make sure :

- NormalMap layer is editable (or that you're using normalmap blend mode on your current layer)
- color pick tool doesn't pick from all layers, else you won't be able to pick the normal map values and it's very useful to edit local values instead of guess-picking them on the image
- paint mode is not using opacity, only pressure. Seems odd but you'll find that when painting normals you often get great results with a bold stroke instead of hundreds little touches. But that's a personal taste, you can still get great results with opacity turned on
 

NormalMapPicker.tga

[Vexod14]

Thanks @Carlosan for taking the time to share it here, hope this will help more users getting into handpainted normals in 3DCoat as a way to further break the "3D feel" in our medium.

Please note that you can also learn on this technique by watching artists who work(ed) on Wayfinder/overwatch, I started to dig this technique after seeing multiple posts from Romain Durand on Twitter/X (https://www.romaindurand.com), he's not alone but probably the one who shared the most hints on it.

What's here should give you a solid starter pack to tackle these maps in 3DCoat

Edited March 17 by Vexod14