Finally I share some link to nice reading info related:  HOW TO CREATE A VIDEO GAME CHARACTER: KEY PRINCIPLES  THE BASICS OF 3D CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT FOR VIDEO GAMES  FPS WEAPON CREATION: HOW TO MATCH AAA STANDARDS

My opinion: In an era where large companies do not recover the large investment put into some games, they are reducing costs by laying off staff, AI is advancing more on positions that perform repetitive tasks, and burnout has become common...  3DCoat is the ideal tool for mid, low and solo developers who make their own games and -in relation to production costs- have more profits developing games for mobiles and PCs (also making them for H5 gamers).

When looking for tools, there is no tool that entirely solves all the steps of the process since for each of them you need a tool specialized only in that stage. Let's take as an example the skills requested by a AAA company like Room8Studio to select their future artists. We are looking for experienced and highly skilled 3D Character Artists: Superpowers you have are: High-poly sculpt in Zbrush; SubD modeling in Max / Maya; Character topology for animation; Cloth simulation in Marvelous Designer; Strong knowledge of anatomy; Experience in working with hard surface; Texturing in Substance Painter; Good understanding of modern pipelines and requirements for the Photorealistic Character creation; Ability to follow and correctly interpret / improve the concept idea; Teamwork skills; Work experience in game projects for PCs and consoles as a Character Artist; Relevant portfolio with examples of works in the corresponding direction.   You’re a rockstar if you have  Experience creating hair for games; Experience in making creatures; Knowledge of Unreal Engine 4; Drawing skills; Good understanding of rigging and animation process; Intermediate English level and above.   As a part of Room 8 studio, you will  Create high-poly and low-poly models of photoreal characters and creatures for games on given concepts; Create optimal UV mapping and texture baking (normal, AO, etc.); Work with photorealistic texturing; Work with game engines. As you can see there is not a single app that perform all this request.

Quality games characters or props are realized by team work.  You must acquire the knowledge that allows you to know how to select the appropriate tool to do your job. And to be able to reach god level, which is what they currently ask for each skill. 3DCoat excels on hand painting and retopology, and is very good at sculpting and modeling. But AAA game companies ask that you know the tools they use and for which they have spent years developing their own solutions such as scripts, plugins and addons that make up their own workflow. The 3DCoat development team has worked hard to add the necessary tools to easily be part of those ecosystems, expanding the language to python, improving the creation of extensions and the possibility of creating add-ons by external developers.

Hello! There seems to be no limit. I did autoretopo 200k and 300k without any problems.

Thank you very much for your support @Carlosan!

I was about to post a similar thread as I just found out Vue is now free. I have been a registered user of Vue since version 4 and an annual subscriber since they moved to subscription model. Love Vue. It is my favorite renderer and landscape app. Much better then Bryce ever was...

I have a vanilla installation working without issues (I am not using sys variables, but have onedrive uninstalled) 3dcoat is installed by default at C:\Program Files\3DCoat-2024 userdata at C:\Users\username\Documents\3DCoat also there is a C:\Users\user\Documents\3DC2Blender used as bridge to locate the Exchange_folder.txt file The text inside that file is:   On blender (4.1) this is my config Exchange folder is pointed to this location C:\Users\username\Documents\3DCoat\Exchange\

Been through both those but still the same, as I mentioned it appears to be 3dcoat is 'in the wrong place', but there not really any description of where 3dcoat expects this applink data (I guess I could go look at the plugin itself). I really think the best solution (applink breaking has been something for the last 10 years) would be to let us set the folder manually in 3dcoat. No more guessing or trying to work around some OS thing (OneDrive is standard part of Windows 11 these days) and if the default don't work we could just set the shared folder on both sides of the applink.  

Has this information not been helpful to you?  

I've used the COAT_USER_PATH system environment variable to relocate the 3dcoat data to the c: version (not OneDrive) but still nothing.   3D Coat log doesn't output anything unusual except it has two paths for blender but there is only one (it thinks there is an old 3.7 version but thats been deleted). Really would be useful to be able to specify a directory to use from 3dcoat, then I could just point to the two app to the same folder and then problem solved.  

Thank you for the explanation. I looked through the video for more understanding. There was one point that I did not name correctly. When I said Bake, I always meant the command  Sorry for that. 3DCoat has many features. In my eyes the problem seems to be that there is no structure in the bunch of rooms and commands.  If there are related rooms that are meant to work together, why are these rooms not connected to each other by a tree-like structure in the rooms? Only ideas. There is a lot to learn for me. Thank you for your support, hope I can come back in case I run into another problem. Best regards Walter

Updated to latest blender and 3dcoat and app link isn't working. In desperation deleted all configs of both, uninstalled and then reinstalled them.  Completely new (including 3dcoat installing the new blender plugin) but applink still doesn't work. How do I set the folder(s) that 3dcoat looks in? The blender plugin is writing to the default export folder correctly but 3dcoat doesn't seem to notice. I do wonder if related to OneDrive doing weird things to the documents folder so I want to tell 3dcoat to not use the document folder but using the relocate user data option doesn't seem to do anything to the applink part. So how do I change where 3dcoat is looking for applink data? Thanks

Sadly no, if that possibility exists, it is beyond my knowledge. Try the discord channel, maybe someone has an answer to that  https://discord.gg/Y5N3xv7Z