This time Pilgway has added Live Clay, which allows the model to dynamically tessellate as you’re working, only adding geometry where it’s needed. With version four comes yet more bang for your buck as the features keep coming. With that in mind, if you don’t fancy painting directly onto polygons or voxels you could use the more tradition, 2D route within the Texture Editor, inside 3D-Coat. With AppLinks you can also jump between the two applications with ease, as you can also do with Maya, Modo, LightWave and a host of others. Add to this a layer system mirroring Photoshop’s own, complete with blending modes, and you’re onto a real winner. Colouring actual pixels rather than polygons is ideal for game development, particularly on lower-resolution models. I began using 3D-Coat a few years ago, focusing mainly on the texture painting tools, which now also allow you to paint coloured specular, emissive and normal map data onto imported models, almost as if you were sculpting them. These, however, are just a small area of what has become a huge application, fully capable of taking a model from concept right through to completion, including UV mapping, posing, sculpting and rendering.

Being cheaper than the mainstream is not automatically a sign of inferiority.ģD-Coat is a feature-packed application best known for its texture painting, voxel sculpting and solid retopology tools. Quite often, though, bigger doesn’t always mean better. You would be forgiven for thinking that in an industry dominated by the likes of Autodesk, there is little option or reason for looking elsewhere.

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