"3D Coat: how good is its capacity to auto-generate a hollow model with just the right wall thickness?"
Very simple with 3D Coat. In fact I would suppose voxels are the absolute best for complicated shelling as the voxel unit is so small and offsetting it mathematically is fairly simple (I believe). In any case, I've never seen any problems with even the most complicated shelling offsets...positive or negative.
It's one reason why I use 3D Coat for complex 3D Printing of models.
Chip and Marco: I've bought 3D Coat! I hope you're proud of me now. ;) I expect to spend the next few months not sleeping but watching about 8723984 3D Coat video tutorials, including yours, Chip. :)
You'll also find 3D Coat GREAT and EASY for UV mapping MoI OBJ exports. Very simple once you get things figured out. Glad to hear you purchased it. A bit of a learning curve (I'm still learning) but the results, IMO, are worth it.
Thanks Chipp! (Sorry for writing your name incorrectly up to now, I always thought your name was Chip P. Walters :) )
I'm currently happily swimming around in the lake of 3D Coat video tutorials, including yours.
I'm impressed by the versatility of 3D Coat. The highlights to me so far are:
• Very accessible and customizable UI. I'm very glad I could change the viewport navigation controls to what I'm used to, because sadly ZBrush doesn't allow navigation customization.
• Great and very flexible arsenal of primitives. Love the fact that they remain intact for further manipulation, and that you can instantly use Boolean operations when hitting Apply.
• Retopo tools. I did some first tests, comparing ZRemesher results to Autopo results, and most of the time Autopo has a slight advantage, especially when using curve guides. But the manual retopo tools are fabulous as well. 3D Coat will be my retopo tool for sure.
• I also love the many stroke types, including powerful curve tools. Curve tools are a weakness of ZBrush.
I still have to dive into the UV room and Smart Materials. Looking forward to that too.
Glad you're getting up to speed w/3DC. Please do keep us posted on your findings...as I'm not a ZBrush user but I do have a couple people working with me who are, and I'd certainly like to stay up-to-date on the procons.
— Pros:
• Total polygon-free sculpting freedom, with no polygon stretching, almost like sculpting with NURBS objects.
• Booleans never fail, because it's voxels, not polygons.
• Lots of great stroke tools, including versatile curves.
• Some fabulous tools to achieve quick results, such as the Blob tool and the Sketch tool, which works slightly more intuitive than the comparable Shadowbox in ZBrush.
• 3D Coat's layers are more intuitive and powerful than the subtools in ZBrush. For example, you can't create a subtool hierarchy in ZBrush, like you can with 3D Coat's layers.
— Cons:
• Blobby results if the resolution is not high enough, but that also goes for polygon sculpting in ZBrush.
• Sharp sculpting operations like creasing don't work very well, because of the absolute cubic nature of voxels. But in that case you just switch to Surface mode, or increase the voxel resolution.
• The smooth tool works a bit better in ZBrush. In ZBrush the results are smoother, and you can choose between two smoothing methods. 3D Coat's Smooth tool tends to eat away a surface area, a bit like the Smooth function in Blender's Sculpt Mode.
• ZBrush handles multi-million polygon models better than 3D Coat. But 3D Coat handles multi-million polygons better than Blender's Sculpt Mode.
2: 3D Coat's powerful retopology tools.
— Pros:
• Auto-retopo is solid, and more or less on par with ZRemesher in ZBrush. I've noticed that Autopo better follows your curve guides than ZRemesher does.
• The manual retopo tools are also great. In fact, the best I've seen so far in any tool.
— Con:
• There's still no holy grail of auto-retopo, especially when it comes to detailed models. Instant Meshes does a great job, but its curse is that it generates a lot of triangle dead-ends in the polygon flow that create ugly surface knots when subdivided.
3: 3D Coat's versatile Paint and Material tools.
— Pros:
• Lots of useful paint tools, including a text tool and a rubber stamp tool.
• Paint layers with opacity and all, like in Photoshop.
• Works great with both UV texturing as well as vertex painting (I'm not a UV lover).
• The Smart Materials are fabulous.
— Cons:
• When you export a textured result, you'll have to apply all textures to the right channels individually in an external renderer like Keyshot. That's easier from ZBrush to Keyshot, because there's a bridge between those programs, which includes polypaint (vertex color) support in Keyshot.
• 3D Coat's renderer is more like a realtime renderer than a sophisticated path tracing renderer. But starting with 3D Coat 3.8, you can choose to use Renderman.
Last but not least, 3D Coat's UI is more accessible than the UI of ZBrush. In ZBrush I dislike the many tiny, sensitive sliders, and a number of obstinate, odd approaches, such as the painful curve system.
Marco: Hahaha, yeah, it seems that we can't afford to become lazy for now. I hope AI will change auto-retopology soon.
Speaking of AI — Michael, have you thought of using AI / machine learning for topology generation? Although MoI's topology generation is already the best in the field, machine learning might help recognizing shapes and optimizing polygon layouts. There are several open source machine learning resources available.
Hi Metin, it's an interesting idea but I don't have any experience in the area of AI / machine learning at all. I think it would require a lot of effort and research to attempt something like that.
