![]() Pilgway’s 3D-Coat has done something quite extraordinary over the last couple of years, it has placed itself in a sweet spot of a market dominated by ZBrush, Mari and earlier, Mudbox.3D-Coat is software for designing 3D objects and characters. It has grown to a mature multi-tool that is taken seriously now even by larger production companies. The present version rivals and even surpasses some of the features in ZBrush 4R7, and now after 4.5 update 3D-Coat can do PBR. (Only thing ZBrush can do at the moment is a BPR, a Best Preview Render, not PBR, acronym chaos!).ģD-Coat is extremely well featured package. It can do both volumetric and surface based 3D sculpting, re-topology, UV unwrapping, per-pixel texture painting directly on a model (without never having to watch UV seam), baking, PBR in both variants (Metal-Rough & Spec-Gloss), Ptex, and render nice previews of the model with HDRI environment maps. Heck, it even has a rudimentary cloth simulation and instancing! It is completely possible to finish a complete modelling project without ever having to leave the application. This scifi pistol concept was completely created in 3D Coat. I have been big fan of 3D-Coat since version 3 what caught my attention that time was the ability to unwrap models so easily and per-pixel painting. I didn’t dare to step into the sculpting room since I was such a big fan of ZBrush since the earlier days and didn’t want to compromise my learned shortcuts. 3D-Coat 3 had bugs, and often the UV tools crashed the application it had especially trouble dealing with objects with many pieces. I’m glad to say that the current version is rather stable. ![]() Seeing the PBR introduced in 4.5 made me to upgrade my licence. ![]() I am enjoying to use 3D-Coat for many kind of modelling tasks now. SculptingģD-Coat has two sculpting modes, Surface Mode and volumetric Voxel Mode. Working with voxels is kind of like working with Dynamesh in ZBrush, the resolution of the sculpture is dependant on the volume, size of the object. There are several differences though, with voxels you can sculpt holes that punch through the object and you don’t need to re-dynamesh, it is done automatically. Voxels are like pixels but in three dimensional space, if that makes any sense. You never see the voxels themselves, you see only a mesh that is projected real time over the voxels. Surface Mode allows you to work with, well, surface. This surface can be re-skinned, and adaptive subdivision can be used. So one could, for example build the main forms using Voxel Mode and do the fine detailing in Surface Mode, as the latter is also easier on your system. Either of these modes can be used for both organic and hard surface sculpting.įor my needs sculpting in 3D-Coat doesn’t fall much short of ZBrush, even though there are way less brushes. I am not big anatomy guy, but sometimes I wish there would be ZSketch kind of workflow. And I miss some of the brushes in ZBrush, especially TrimSmoothBorder for making rocks and such. But for almost for each of the ZBrush tool, there is equivalent in here. Again, I’ve noticed that if I can do something in ZBrush I can find a way to do it at least somehow in 3D-Coat. What’s great about 3D-Coat is that you can use boolean operations when working in voxel mode to subtract and blend models. All of a sudden, simple primitives become so powerful. Creating a Creek pillar (the one with pill shaped grooves) could be done, for example, by using subtracting capsule primitives with a radial symmetry from a cylinder. This is way of working is a bit similar to the Dynamesh boolean operations in ZBrush. Re-topology being performed on highres sculpt. Notice the retopo objects in upper right corner of the page. ![]() There is also now selection of retopo models to aid the retopology process, as well as new tools such as Free Extrude which allows extrude-like modelling operations. These are so useful that I rarely need to visit external application, no matter how complicated the object I’m making is. I had a bit of a problem when I was importing a retopo model from Lightwave to 3D-Coat (check out my Youtube video). For some reason the model I was trying to import appeared grayed out and I couldn’t get it to work no matter what I tried. However I learned that retopology in 3D-Coat is based in the UV set. ![]()
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