Another key point is whether or not you're looking to 'voxelize' in 3D Coat or just use 3DC to apply appropriate UV maps. I've been doing the latter a lot lately with Rubbermaid and Coleman CAD files and it works great as a basic UV Mapping tool and PBR shader workflow. You can then use Marmoset, Element 3D, Unity, UE4 or InstantLight.

Using 3D Coat, it's easy to add normal map wrinkles, bumps and textures on your model (in my case a tent) and you don't need (or really want) a super high poly model. Lots of times smaller is better.

Also, something very interesting I posted on one of my last videos: Exporting from MoI3D to SketchUp can create a better smoothed normal object for import into 3D Coat. 3DC doesn't have normal map smoothing and a 'coarser' mesh coming out of MoI3D can have smoothing errors (see my video starting at 9 minute mark:)



Lastly, for those interested in Unity, I'm getting some very high rez photoreal renders (realtime) out of it using MoI models. While I can't show any at this time, I will be adding some more public ones soon and will gladly share. The 3DC -> Unity is a wonderful workflow as it's so damn easy to go back and forth using the 3DC->Unity plugin.

Also, the same is VERY TRUE for SketchUp to Unity (save in SU 2015 format) and you can easily go back and forth with the built in SU support. It's pretty cool as you can assign those cheesey maps in SU to objects, (which is a MUST if you want to map in Unity-- assigning an image texture map in SU automatically generates UVs for the model-- though not necessarily very good ones) then double click the images to open them in Photoshop, upscale them 8X and add in your own texture and then save and it's automatically loaded back into Unity-- wonderful! Also, you can take an RGB texture, duplicate it, and add it as a NORMAL map in Unity and it will automatically render it out as a normal map. Pretty sweet.

Truly the SU workflow in Unity is something to behold-- especially if going to VR. Cool stuff!