Voxel Sculpting is a Big Deal Pt 3View the full article

Hi everyone, I’m running into a shading problem after bringing a retopologized mesh from Blender into 3DCoat for texturing. Some curved areas of the model appear darker or slightly faceted, even though everything looks normal in Blender. I already checked the normals in Blender and they seem correct, so I’m wondering if the issue might be related to smoothing, normal maps, or certain import settings in 3DCoat. Has anyone experienced something similar? Any suggestions on what settings or steps I should check before starting the painting process? Thanks in advance!

Thank you for your advice. In the version in question, I turned on the RealityCapture check button, but RealityCapture did not appear. I think there must be some fundamental problem. A new version of 3D-coat has already been released, so I will update to the new 2026 version.  

Normal map doesn't work well in 3Dcoat smart material but this is fine using a height map. The Depth channel icon in Smart Materials may look like it’s for a Normal Map, but it’s not. It’s strictly for greyscale Displacement/Height maps. This is confusing because the icon for depth on smart material editor is blue/purple and because every other texturing software use normal map.  If you will provide a normal map for the Smart Material the 3DCoat will offer to convert it to the bump-map because materials require bump. This is a non-trivial operation, so it may take some time to convert for big maps. 

ow, I think I found my answer. I have to unlock it, then I can tweak:   Now it looks like I can now. Requires a lot of changing the values. Not even sure what I did LOL! Depth at 0%:   Depth at 100%: Seems to be working! If anyone have tips how to tweak to it's best. Please tell. I am messing around. Going to use it in a Godot Game engine.

Hello, I am using a simple wood diffuse JPG file as my color for the custom smart material. That looks fine as far as I know I also used the same exact image to create an normal map, using Krita: link: https://www.graphicsandprogramming.net/eng/tutorial/krita/make-textures-in-krita/krita-tutorial-map-displacement-height-normal It looks normal as it should, exported  it as a jpg: used this normal map in the smart material:   But when I change between depth 0~100% I see no change at all in my material preview window. Am I doing something wrong?    

Ah, changed to menu "edit" >> calculate curvature.  

Following an 3D course, and the teacher is adding a curvature layer: Menu "Texture" >> calculate curvature layer. He is using 3Dcoat version 4.8.18. I am using 2025.17. So I cannot find the option to add this layer. Where can I find this? (I know it can do that automatically, but I like to do it manually also.)

source... Parallax mapping is a technique similar to normal mapping, but based on different principles. Just like normal mapping it is a technique that significantly boosts a textured surface's detail and gives it a sense of depth. While also an illusion, parallax mapping is a lot better in conveying a sense of depth and together with normal mapping gives incredibly realistic results. While parallax mapping isn't necessarily a technique directly related to (advanced) lighting, I'll still discuss it here as the technique is a logical follow-up of normal mapping. Note that getting an understanding of normal mapping, specifically tangent space, is strongly advised before learning parallax mapping. Parallax mapping is closely related to the family of displacement mapping techniques that displace or offset vertices based on geometrical information stored inside a texture. One way to do this, is to take a plane with roughly 1000 vertices and displace each of these vertices based on a value in a texture that tells us the height of the plane at that specific area. Such a texture that contains height values per texel is called a height map. An example height map derived from the geometric properties of a simple brick surface looks a bit like this: When spanned over a plane, each vertex is displaced based on the sampled height value in the height map, transforming a flat plane to a rough bumpy surface based on a material's geometric properties. For instance, taking a flat plane displaced with the above heightmap results in the following image: A problem with displacing vertices this way is that a plane needs to contain a huge amount of triangles to get a realistic displacement, otherwise the displacement looks too blocky. As each flat surface may then require over 10000 vertices this quickly becomes computationally infeasible. What if we could somehow achieve similar realism without the need of extra vertices? In fact, what if I were to tell you that the previously shown displaced surface is actually rendered with only 2 triangles. This brick surface shown is rendered with parallax mapping, a displacement mapping technique that doesn't require extra vertex data to convey depth, but (similar to normal mapping) uses a clever technique to trick the user. The idea behind parallax mapping is to alter the texture coordinates in such a way that it looks like a fragment's surface is higher or lower than it actually is, all based on the view direction and a heightmap. To understand how it works, take a look at the following image of our brick surface: Here the rough red line represents the values in the heightmap as the geometric surface representation of the brick surface and the vector V¯ represents the surface to view direction (viewDir). If the plane would have actual displacement, the viewer would see the surface at point B. However, as our plane has no actual displacement the view direction is calculated from point A as we'd expect. Parallax mapping aims to offset the texture coordinates at fragment position A in such a way that we get texture coordinates at point B. We then use the texture coordinates at point B for all subsequent texture samples, making it look like the viewer is actually looking at point B. The trick is.... continue reading

Hi which version are you using ? How do you have set your Brush Preferences ?

Here is an example: I set the depth to 100 for the Sphere tool, but when I switch to Vox Hide, the depth jump to 4239% regardless of its previous value. Then, when I go back to the Sphere tool, it’s reset to 1%. Why are the depth values so all over the place? I can manually reset them, but it’s a huge hassle to do this every time I switch tools. Is there a fix for this?

Same thing on Manjaro XFCE. Did the same, installed the libraries in Linuxlibs folder. Although my Linux knowledge is extremely limited, maybe someone will find something useful from the steps I took: ********************* 1.Install basic build tools (one time). Run these commands in a terminal: sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel gcc make pkgconf 2.Create a working directory and download the archive: cd ~/Software mkdir -p icu70-src cd icu70-src wget https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/releases/download/release-70-1/icu4c-70_1-src.tgz 3.Unpack it: tar xf icu4c-70_1-src.tgz cd icu/source 4.Configure ICU to install under your home. Install it under ~/Software/icu70-local so it doesn’t touch system /usr: mkdir -p ~/Software/icu70-local ./configure --prefix=$HOME/Software/icu70-local 5.Build and install ICU 70 locally.This may take a few minutes: make -j$(nproc) make install 6. After this, the libraries will be under: ls $HOME/Software/icu70-local/lib You should see files like: libicuuc.so.70 libicui18n.so.70 libicudata.so.70     (and a few others) 7.Copy required ICU 70 libs into LinuxLibs: cd ~/Software/3DCoat-2026.01 cp ~/Software/icu70-local/lib/libicuuc.so.70* LinuxLibs/ cp ~/Software/icu70-local/lib/libicui18n.so.70* LinuxLibs/ cp ~/Software/icu70-local/lib/libicudata.so.70* LinuxLibs/ Because LD_LIBRARY_PATH already points to LinuxLibs first, 3DCoat should now find libicuuc.so.70 and continue starting. ******************  

Fedora 43 KDE. I've go an error for 3DCoat 2026.01: error while loading shared libraries: libicuuc.so.70: cannot open shared object file: No such file or director I managed to fix this problem. I downloaded the necessary library from pkgs.org and installed all the libraries in LinuxLibs. It worked, and the program is working now. But there is one thing that bothers me. According to pkgs.org, Libicu70 is only available for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. I am afraid that owners of the current 24.04.4 LTS may encounter this problem.

Ok, thanks for the reply. Perhaps a future feature, one could hope.

@Andreas WolmerHi! Masking, as implemented in Paint Room, isn't implemented in the Sculpt room on sculpt layers. However, you can use sculpt layers to modify surface geometry and hide them when needed.

(accidentally posted this in Tutorials section first, moving it here as it's actually a functionality question)  Hi! I'm trying out some sculpting with layers (in Surface Mode), and just wanted to check if the layer masks are supposed to work with sculpt information? Because I can't seem to make it work. Cheers Andreas

Copy the files from C:\Program Files\3DCoat-2025\data\ToolsPresets\InstallAppLinks\Blender following this instruction  

Found out the problem: By default 3Dcoat sets the brush size to: ZERO! Which genius made that default value. It was a fresh 3DCoat install. After I could fill the object with a PBR standard 3Dcoat material I thought, it must be something else. It is working now.   

I downloaded the Applink 4.1 version and installed it into Blender 4.5.7 LTS. I could send a simple cube: Your link you gave, from the other forum post (Applink Blender 4.1): https://projects.blender.org/extensions/io_coat3D Other link for APPlink version (Blender 4.2 / 4.3): https://github.com/AndrewShpagin/io-coat3d Edit:  link from Blenders side with several version of Applink: https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/coat-applink/versions/   Blender 4.5 is shipped with version 5.0. It does not always show up right away. I do not understand why. after I installed an older version it also avctivated 5.0 also. 2 versions active. So, I disabled an older one then.   Hope fully the get back function will work too. Otherwise it is no biggy. Than just manual import / export then. Thank you so far.