Hi Guys ,, any one using 3d coat as a texturing tool since i havent found much good info on texturing ,, how is it compared to substance painter or other 3d programs
also any one using quixel suit for texturing ,, im in confusion to choose between substance painter or quixel suit .. which easy to pick up for 2d artist Thanks
I can't comment on 3d coat, and I barely have touched the quixel suite. I know it is integrated with photoshop instead of standalone(unless something has changed), but I also know that when I tried it, it felt wonky to me, somehow not natural, and there were wait times galore while things processed.
Substance painter on the other hand feels great to me. I'm currently subscribing to the "Live" thingy and will own the software suite soon. I like that it integrates with the whole substance thing, as it is easy to package whole materials in substances. The designer that uses nodes to create things is not bad either, though it is far from traditionally painting textures, although some techniques you know you can apply through the nodes. But painter....it is like 3d photoshop. You paint whole materials at once. The brush engine is not bad, having much of the variety of photoshop there. And the material system gives all the variety you could ever need, and when something is missing, you can easily create and import it. And then the final great touch is the particle brush, which creates a 3d particle system and paints using that.
I really like substance painter so far. I've always lacked texturing skills and it works really great. I tried DDO a while back but I hated the whole photoshop integration deal. I think now they are more like substance painter from what I've seen.
Used all of them, still using 3D Coat, like a lot, extensivley used DDO, and used substance painter a short time.
Substance painter felt weird to me, hard to control and offering little useful features, though that was still in Beta at the time. Substance DESIGNER on the other hand had many useful features I might still use today.
DDO is a good tool, if you create 3D Models that support the way it is meant to be used. For one, DDO doesn't do a "3D Mapping", instead everything will be mapped in texture space. If you don't know what I mean, put a seam on a very visible part of the model, and use a material with a very visible tilable diffuse or other channel.
Bam, you just got a prominent seam on your model because the tilable texture is enhancing this seam, as the texture is mapped in 2D over the texture, ignoring the UVs. Very ugly.
Some things that hid the seams in creases of the model looked good when textured with DDO. When I turned down the intensity of the material the seams became harder to see on other models. And the whole thing did speed up the process when going for photorealistic textures.
Between that 2D mapping issue, various instability problems and the whole PS Plugin thingy, I stopped using DDO some time ago.
3D Coat on the other hand I can recommend... with some caveats.
Given that the most useful part of the product is actually the retopo and UV tools (which are better than anything else I have used to date, certainly better than the ones in Blender), and that a pretty powerful sculpting solution (Voxels, has some drawbacks compared to ZBrush in some areas, but seems to be better in others) and the very useful 3D Painting tools are just a useful extra, the 3D texturing tools are surprisingly good.
Having tried to use the new material function in 3D Coat, this hasn't work for me yet. I hoped for a DDO like functionality, but mapped in 3D space (which AFAIK was the idea)... somehow I haven't gotten it to work yet, and without the texture library DDO comes with, that function is only half as useful anyway.
But if you don't mind downloading / providing your own tilable textures (search for dirt maps, or have a look at websites like gametextures.com), and doing a little bit more work, you get very useful 3D mapping options in 3D Coat.
You can actually fill the whole object with a cubemapped tilable texture using the fill tool, you just need to select the "custom" preset. Or you can use a tilable heightmap as a mask to paint normals, color information or roughness/metalness information. Very useful to introduce the sort of small details that DDO does so effortless, with more handywork, but a real 3D mapping this time.
In general, for not so photorealistic work, 3D Coat is the best option IMO. As soon as you get into photorealistic textures, DDO starts getting more attractive because the materials ARE very useful (even though the 3D mapping issue renders them unusable for some 3D objects)... Hopefully the Materials in 3D Coat will evolve into something just as useful, but as of now, I cannot recommend them (might be my stupidness in not seeing the correct way to use them though... the material library is still too small though).
As for substance painter, IDK. Will have to have another look at it.
