Hi Chipp and good morning!

For what I see I can say that you're traveling the right way with 3D-Coat and your knowledge of that software is steadily growing!
My compliments!!

It's true that I'm a fan of 3D-Coat and then I know I'm a bit partial, but I think that 3D-Coat in some specific areas is becoming a very powerful
product, deserving to be inlcuded in every semi-professional or even professional 3D pipeline.
It undoubtedly still lacks in some specific area, like for example its loss of support for super high texture resolution
or its retopo editor a little bit limited, but in Pilgway they're thinking to expand the retopo editor to make it a TRUE polygonal (and maybe SDS) editor.

And, above all, we are talking about a software that for the full version costs only 379 USD !!!!
A super low crazy price!!!

For what is my (still) little experience with 3D-Coat I see that the major difficulty is to use in the correct way the workflow voxel-surface and vice-versa.
The best is always : starting with voxel to model the main body and then jump to surface mode with LiveClay or "Remove Stretching" option for model
all the details.
Also I've been practicing with "Proxy Mode", a largely unknown technique that can save a lot of time jumping back and forth from macro and micro modifications of the models.

During my experiments of hard surface modelling I often use this workflow :

1) I first model the main bodies using Rhino/Moi or NVIL/R3F (Poly/SDS)
2) Import the models into 3D-Coat's Voxel room using the obj file ONLY as a "mold", just to FILL the voxel area.
3) Into 3D-Coat I work with high-poly voxel models
4) I use often the "Vox Hide" + "Objectify hidden" or "Split" commands to break the main body into the various parts.


> You wrote : "...Can only be rendered with textures and decals in 3D Coat and KeyShot AFAIK. Perhaps Instant Light, too. Trying to learn more but it's a strange program with a very strange non standard interface (which I'm not all that interested in learning-- I wish other people would take a page out of Michaels book on using standardized and simple interfaces!)"

I totally agree with you about InstantLight's UI.
Although I'm a beta tester of IL and I think that it's a very powerful software and a new "fresh air" into the RealTime renderer panorama,
I totally don't like its absurd UI.
But from tests I made so far, it seems to be more powerful and faster than the famous Marmorset Toolbag 3, especially regarding the Global Illumination.

Furthermore there's one thing that seems to be very promising : The creators of IL announced that the next first official version of IL will have
the support for Vertex Shaders!!
In that way it will be possible to import high poly voxels and directly assign materials to them without the need to do a retopo low-poly version
of the models.

Merry Christmas to everyone and see you!

- Marco (mkdm)