3DCoat 4.7
Main New Tools:
- Innovative Physically-Based Shader. Fully compatible with GGX lighting now.
In detail:
- Practically all Voxel Shaders are PBR-compatible. Every shader contains plenty of tweakable options, such as various textures, Cavity, Metalness, SSS, Gloss, Bulge parameters and more. Real-time support for bulge and cavity ensured.
- PicMat-s available too, but the correctness of baking is not guaranteed, therefore use at interim stages recommended only.
- The paint room has all the PBR shader effects (but for pseudo SSS) precisely baked.
- Full support of GGX ensures compatibility with the majority of modern game engines and renderers.
- The color of background shader remains non-modulated when painting over a mesh. However, the layer 0 painting is disabled under Voxels/Surface mode.
Some downsides:
- Due to the shader system total overhaul, the old shaders have been removed.
- As they’ve been disabled, you will have to manually build the old panoramas as HDR or EXR files from start.
- Various maps Baking possible, including SSS, AO.
- Introducing an updated Export Constructor. Customize your way to pack multiple channels into one texture. Adapting 3DCoat's texture export to any game engine or renderer has never been easier.
- Anti-aliased painting now possible across everything: Vertex Painting, Ptex, MV, PPP. The area of application covers stencils, brushes, materials, curved pictures and text.
- The low-poly modeling Retopo Toolset updated: Extrude vertices, Extrude faces, Cut and Connect, Shell, Intrude.
- Set of Primitives expanded: spirals, screws and so on, including an extensive pool of Options.
- Export for 3D Prints introduced in the Professional license.
Additions to Paint Room:
- Speed of Per-Pixel Painting boosted dramatically, in particular with high-res textures, large polys, and cavity-dependent materials.
- Gloss/Specular color workflow has the Metalness export enabled now.
- PPP got a new import option now: each material imported as a separate UV-set.
- Exported OBJ files contain relative texture paths.
- Painting with Smart Materials depth channel replaces the current one on the layer, as opposed to continuous growth.
- Get the color from anywhere on screen with the color picker. Clicking on dialogue outside the picker window still ensures picking the color. The "V" hotkey can be used there too.
- Paint groups default names now have Group # instead of Layer #.
- RMB->Share item/folder functions properly with PBR-materials.
- Drop your image directly on Smart-material editor slots now.
Additions to Sculpt Room:
- The "sector" option has a nice bevel in primitives added.
- 3d lasso in e-panel added to smoother/angulator/subdivide.
- Merge all/merge subtree for non-boolean.
- Move tool has "Ignore back faces" supported in surface mode.
- As opposed to sculpting action, LMB/RMB/MMB outside of Sculpt RMB menu results in closing the menu now.
- A more logical order ensured for the Space Panel tools.
- Selecting volume via H key, the scrolling action to show selected volume will occur in the VoxTree.
- The following option introduced: Geometry -> Retopo mesh->Sculpt mesh.
Additions to Retopo/UV Room:
- Compatibility with PBR introduced for retopo shaders. Panorama taken into account when lighting the retopo model.
- Extrude vertices, extrude faces, Shell, Intrude introduced with the retopo/select/faces mode.
- The select/edges retopo toolset has the Free extrude command added.
- We have improved the "Conform retopo" feature
- Correct work of undo ensured, as well as visibility of retopo mesh during transformations.
- Hole capped with Shift in Add/Split and Quads tools.
- Selection not cleared by hitting ESC in retopo/transform.
- Flip faces option added in retopo/select.
- Clear selection option added in Retopo/Select path.
- Extrusion committed by ENTER in retopo transform/extrude tool.
- "Auto in local space" checkbox introduced in selection Retopo transform gizmo.
- Edge loops with SHIFT + click introduced with retopo/select/edges mode.
- Even in case there is just one vertex in the brush the position of vertex to cursor will not be snapped with Move via Brush tool in the Retopo room.
- Saving contours for cutting enabled in the UV and Retopo rooms, see the menu Commands->Save contour. Save files as EPS or DXF. This feature is particularly handy for real-world items production, such as shoes or acrylic parts etc.
- The Retopo room now has Cut and Connect for the low-poly modeling.
- Speed of transformation feature introduced (material navigation in UV mapping mode tweaks).
- Baking Sculpt objects onto the current paint mesh enabled. Retopo->Update paint mesh. This preserves the textures painted, while updating the normal map and layers related to the Sculpt volumes. In case you need to add changes to geometry at a very late stage, this feature sim
plifies the workflow considerably. In addition, you can import the paint mesh to Sculpt room directly via Geometry->Paint mesh->Sculpt mesh.
- Retopo commands slightly reorganized: commands applicable to the current tool and to the entire mesh have been separated.
Additions to Render Room:
- Improved rendering quality in the Render room. Samples summarized with the gamma correction which ensures considerably better visual effect now.
- The diffuse component rendering improved. Higher contrast and nicer lightning can be achieved now. This feature provides for much better-looking PBR and a great compatibility with other engines.
- An array of new panoramas added.
Miscellaneous Other Changes:
- A new splash screen introduced.
- We have unified the CUDA and non-CUDA version, so that all the choice is done automatically now.
- Install your Drag&Dropped 3dcpack files automatically now.
- Initial loading speed increased.
- Swapping the panoramas has been accelerated.
- The RMB menu will not be triggered by the RMB over object while navigating now.
- 2D spline mode will not be triggered by a loading spline, when in the 3D selection E-mode. You can perform transforming 3D spline with gizmo as well.
- A bunch of padding method options has been introduced in Preferences.
- Stencils got More/less button support implemented now.
- Scripting has been updated, all the details available in the Vox object and the user manual.
Feel free to discuss 3DCoat 4.7 at our forums
