Hope I'm not overstaying my visit, as this post will mostly be about 3D Coat.

Consider this object (click to view larger)


It represents the start of a robot hand, sculpted in 3D Coat in about an hour. I've been playing around with 3D Coat lately, and I find I can sketch with it like I do in Photoshop. Don't get me wrong, the quality of the final model is quite suspect, and I couldn't use if for finished client design work (I use MoI3d for that), but I could use it for preliminary concept work and quite fast I think.

I'm still trying to learn the program. Voxels are a completely different paradigm that what I'm used to and just like coming from Polys to NURBS, you have to 're-think' your modeling strategies. One of the nice thing 3D Coat has is instancing, which allows me to work on one finger and have them all update, not unlike SketchUp. The other thing about 3D Coat and ZBrush is they have a certain 'look' to them. "Uncrisp" if that's a word.

FWIW, I bought and watched most of Jama's Intro to 3D Concept Design tutorials. He's quite the talent, and really does work 3D Coat magically, but unfortunately he's really weak on actually teaching the basics of what he's doing. He misses a lot of steps and doesn't explain very well HOW he does things. Still, it is very inspirational to watch him work and I do think he put a lot of thought into his workflows. He's just weak on technical stuff and especially explaining technique. All said and done, I still think I got $100 value from watching him work-- so no complaints. I may do some 3D Coat modeling tutes when I get better and understand the process better.