Hi Chipp,

The 3D Coat journey continues…

So far I'm particularly in love with:

1: Voxel sculpting.

— 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.

Regards,

Metin