New(ish) 3D Paint App - Anyone Tried It?

I know exactly what you mean. That's why I use GhostPainter. It's a bridge between Photoshop and 3ds Max that lets you use PS the way you normally do but paint directly on a mesh in a Max viewport. It's not real-time though. It simply tracks your strokes in the viewport, recreates them in PS, then updates the viewport texture with the result, but that's a reasonable tradeoff to have the PS toolset at your fingertips in combination with all the Max UV tools. The new 3d layer in CS3 could have been great if they'd added in painting directly on the 3d object (and some UV editing tooks), but as-is it's no substitute for a good 3d paint app. Unfortunately I can't recommend GhostPainter to anyone who doesn't already own both Max and PS unless you've just won the lotto.

I briefly cracked it open. It needs some more polish that's for sure, but then again it's free so you are getting what you pay for.



If you have ZBrush 3.1 you should check out ZApplink. It's a bridge between ZBrush and Photoshop. It sounds like you already have your work flow down, but it might be worth a look.



Like you, I found it worked well with textures that had random high frequency detail. Grass, pebbles, dirt. Unfortunately I am mostly doing man-made tiling stuff right now and it's not much good with stuff like brick or formed concrete. Gotta do that by hand.

I have to say I'm liking this one, let's start with...

Actual 2d inspired painting tools. Brushes and clones and layers and palettes and swatches oh my! They're much simpler than Zbrush's which seems to suffer greatly by trying to do everything at once (notably mesh creation and the 2.5d/3d, special UI, and subdivision complications) whereas Zbrush's UI is very technical and requires you to think and work in the Zbrush way, 3D-COAT lets you get straight to the painting with pretty much a Photoshop mindset. And the dark UI option is quite nice on the eyes in that Zbrush way (before the mental overload from Zbrush's complexity.)

You're painting directly on the model like Maya's Artisan default and DeepPaint 3D. It may also have projection based painting though I've not found it yet (not that I'm holding my breath to deal with dropping and picking up the model every time I want to change my viewpoint.)

UV tools are... just to get an unmapped mesh paintable it seems. But it will handle automatically smoothing and subdividing your geometry and UVs, then at export rebake them to the original UVs.

WORKING SYMMETRY! Ever wanted to paint symmetrically in Zbrush, just like you could with its sculpt tools? Well... yeah, no more complicating your workflow with mirrored UVs or exporting to other programs to mirror and re-importing to keep painting

Applying 2d decals seems easy enough, using its spline on surface tools you simply create a 1 degree spline on the surface along which to tile file images. Once you set all the properties and have your spline, the image is projected onto the surface's current layer.

Speaking of layers, while they're not as good as Photoshop's, they will allow you to do things like masking according to other layers, and they'll handle materials and such; As well as having several blending options and a some basic built in contrast layer adjustments. They will also export to psd layers, but I haven't noticed the option to export masking and adjustment options with them, so they have to be redone in Photoshop before altering.

Back to the brushes, they are quite simple but have brush tip profiles, some jitter settings, opacity, scaling, spacing, and Wacom support... but I have yet to find options such as min/max for opacity and scaling. As for toggling these specific attributes, they seem tied together in sets, such as "paint with opacity and scaling" and some combinations are missing.

One more plus is the built in SpacePilot support, I was quite surprised when I bumped mine and the view changed after using the mouse camera controls for a while (which are the same as Maya for a personal plus.) Another 'but' here, roll is not disabled by default and I haven't seen an option for it, so this has to be turned off in your SpacePilot software unless you have superhuman 6axis hand-eye coordination.

THE LONG SUMMARY
I have been comparing this to Zbrush a bit because it is taking a stab at a subset of Zbrush's toolset, sculpting and painting. As far as DeepPaint 3D, I haven't used that in... close to a decade but from friends and other things I've seen of it, it's certainly become another technical based powerhouse. 3D-COAT is not. It drops nearly everything technical leaving an easy on the brain 3d paint tool, simplifying both the 2d and 3d tools you're used to allowing you to concentrate on your model, your textures, and your sculpting (if you're using it for more than SL.) As such, your output will likely be simplified as well, not that simple tools can ever really stop an artist. It's definitely a 'but' filled program.

If you're interested in using this program for skinning and clothing, you'll not be able to import the AV meshes directly, not without first fixing their UV maps and I would also suggest chopping off one arm and foot for visual reminders of where the symmetry UVs begin while you're painting.

From a workflow/pipeline standpoint, this is definitely like Zbrush without the actual mesh creation toolset (and without the more detailed UV tools). Make your model elsewhere, get it as close to what you want as possible, UV map it, import it here to sculpt details and make your textures with some help from PS, then export all of your maps back into your workflow.

All in all, I do enjoy the simplicity which allows for much more than it might seem to at first. All I really want to do, is paint on my model without having to shift my brain to new or technical paradigms, that's what this program allows. But it definitely gives that 'work in progress' vibe, there are many things with respect to brushes and layers that still need to be added. Though I'll be considering a license, we'll see how the demo period goes...

Thanks a bunch for that detailed review, Vox. You covered all the stuff I was curious about, especially the Photoshop tie-in. Sorry to hear that things like layer masks don't cross over, but it still sounds pretty useful all in all. The pace of development seems pretty fast so hopefully that will get added in the near future. That was a very helpful post. Thanks again.

Does anyone know if it's possible to export textures from 3d-coat to use on sculpties?
I've managed to make a sculptie ( sculpt in 3d-coat>export as obj> convert to sculptmap in Wings 3d) but can't export the texure properly.

i think, anyway. i'm downloading the demo and hoping. i've been thinking about zbrush, but the initial outlay is pretty high for me.

i don't know much about UV rigging at all, so hopefully i'll be able to do something useful with this. i love GIMP but the seams are killing me.

anyway, thanks for putting this out there, Chip and all.

Anik

well not sure what this means, but my video card started throwing errors, reset itself and generally seemed to have all kinds of problems when i attempted to run this.

didn't see anything similar on their forum or support area, so maybe it's just coincidence, but everything else is running well, so i'm leary at this point.

never got any .obj files to load so didn't get a look at much of anything. nice interface. would love to take a whack at it.

hope your luck is considerably better.
anik