Some days ago while I was watching a documentary movie about Alexey Bogolyubov (wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Bogolyubov)
I was really impressed by his outstanding talent in the creation of hyper realistic paintings with physically correct global illumination!!
Outstanding talent!!! That is amazing, to say the least. Nothing more to say...
Watching this superior quality paintings and art in general I often wander what, those super talented man and woman from the past,
they could have done if they had our modern CG technologies : Nurbs Cad, 3D modeler, Realtime VFX, Image processing, computing power,...
I really consider these artists, man and woman, our great masters for the modern CG.
Although Bryce is very slow compared to modern GPU
render engine, it is still unparalleled
for creating artificial landscapes were we
can place any 3D objects created with any
modeler.
About once a year I'm considering buying 3D Coat once again, but it's hard for me to find a breakthrough reason to do so because I already work with ZBrush, MoI and Blender.
I'm not much into realtime PBR materials, as I'm not into gaming anymore (I used to be a full-time game designer in a far-away past, when 2D games still mostly ruled).
I use MoI for 2D shapes, hard-surface modeling and quick base meshes. Among other things I'm using Blender for Dynamic topology sculpting, and ZBrush for finalizing, automatic retopology and vertex painting.
I'm still looking for the holy grail of automatic retopology. I saw in the 3D Coat V4.7 features video last year that auto-retopo had been improved. Looking at the results it's more or less comparable to ZRemesher. What are your experiences with 3D Coat's autopo?
I've tried Instant Meshes, but it generates too many triangle dead-ends that remain visible after subdividing.
If you don't have a really good UV Mapper, then that would be a really good reason to use 3DC. Another reason for me is to be able to quickly go from polys out of NURBS to voxelize, add distress, and then paint like
@You : "...If you don't have a really good UV Mapper, then that would be a really good reason to use 3DC..."
I totally agree!
IMHO 3D-Coat with this new version 4.8 (actually in beta test) it is increasingly becoming a killer app!
Under 400 USD it's really hard to find better alternatives.
And if you don't need exporting outside 3DC but what you want to do is a super fast production of prototypes and concepts,
I strongly suggest you the fastest workflow actually available inside 3DC :
1) voxels (also in surface mode) : modelling directly in Sculpt Room or importing models created outside (for example obj exported from Moi)
2) Apply Shaders in Sculpt Room
3) Use PBR builtin render.
No UV, NO retopo, NO texturing, NO exporting, nothing.
Of course, using that workflow you can't get photorealistic results, but in less than 2 hours you can create a complete
model, for example a of a medium complexity mechanical object, from scratch to render.
Thanks for the info Chip and Marco, much appreciated. The cannon looks great! This brings me on another possible reason to go for 3D Coat: how good is its capacity to auto-generate a hollow model with just the right wall thickness?
In ZBrush you can use the Dynamesh Shell function to create a wall thickness based on voxels, but in practice the Shapeways 3D print auto-check still finds weak areas with insufficient wall thickness, so ZBrush Dynamesh Shell isn't the one-stop solution I'm looking for.
Talking about again the old and ever green Bryce 7, I'm glad to tell you
that David Brinnen has completely redesigned from scratch his excellent https://www.bryce-tutorials.info/
You have 3 possibilities of nature styles - Deep, Thin, Dream : in one you can input your own images as support of style so infinite possibilities!
and a result with a standard style "Deep" (less 3 minutes)
with "Deep" + my own style (less 3 minutes)
With "Thin" + a style(s) standard (less 40 seconds)
With "Dream" (less 40 seconds) : the original concept of the computer vision in clouds! ;)
4 Possibilities : Standard, Spirit, Neuron, Valyrian, Your own!
Here standard
