This video is a rundown of the features of the latest release of 3DCoat 2024 and why I think it could be a great partner to Blender in your 3D workflow.

Now it's important to say that this video is sponsored by 3DCoat.

They reached out to me and asked me to do a video of their new release and gave me the program for free.

As always I don't promote anything I don't leave in or use myself and I've been interested in the program for a while now as an alternative to Blender in regards to texture painting.

As many of you know the texture painting in Blender is it's fine but there's lots of room for improvement so I'm glad to have the excuse to test it out and it didn't disappoint.

Now I'm not thinking of replacing Blender it's far more of a complementary program and interestingly 3DCoat has recently created an app link with Blender so you can take objects made in Blender and easily send them to 3DCoat and back again for rendering so it works in conjunction with Blender really well but more on that later.

Firstly a quick introduction to 3DCoat. 3DCoat is an all-round modeling, texturing, sculpting, UV mapping, texture baking program in many ways similar to Blender.

The sculpting tools are a little bit more refined than what you see in Blender and the texturing and material tools are closer to something like Substance Perhaps giving a little bit more options to the hand-painted stylized workflow but they're similar there's automatic UV mapping and they've got great retopo tools that seems more advanced than in Blender and the baking tools are much easier and much quicker.

You can bake from a high poly mesh you can automatically bake out cavity maps things that are quite awkward and a bit painful sometimes in Blender but like I say I'm not looking to replace Blender it's seeing if it's going to and work together in a good workflow.

So let's take a closer look at some of these features.

So it's a very quick rundown of what 3DCoat can do with regards to texturing.

Here's quite a fun model it's one of their default models.

You can see the different layers here we've got a normal map, ambient occlusion, cavity mask.

If you haven't got things like the ambient occlusion and the cavity and you bring a model in it can bake one for you and if I go across to the smart materials this is the most fun and click on something like the brass here.

I've got a material preview option here and you can see exactly what that texture is going to look like.

There's an old copper one here which looks good.

If I double click on these I can change some of the parameters.

Let's zoom in a touch so you can see what's going on there.

Something like the cavity you can change the edge wear, the width of that as well to make it a bit more stylized perhaps.

When I'm happy I can fill the layer.

I'll create a new layer and add in something like this paint look here.

Again I can go to the parameters and decide exactly what that might look like.

I'll bring the preview down here and I'll show you that I can start painting on this.

So this whole side here could be this sort of blue color.

I've got lots of different brush options here.

I'll just change the size of that so you can see those and you can see the effect that that's having.

I can then of course change the color to something like a red and have that on the other side.

Again I've got my preview down here showing me exactly what that's going to look like before I even apply it.

I've got the eraser so I can erase from this layer and have sort of a patchy paint look there.

I'll just cancel those smart properties add new layer.

I should really label these but it's just a demonstration.

Let's put the dust in now so you can see the results of the dust.

I can paint that in or I could just fill this whole layer with some dust I think.

So right click fill entire layer and we've got some dust in there now.

It's already looking awesome with these smart materials.

Let's get some rust in there as well so another layer.

Cancel those settings.

Another layer.

Rust.

See what that's going to look like in my material preview and that looks pretty interesting.

Maybe I'll paint this one on this time.

So I'll move my material preview down here.

Paint some of that rust on in different places and you've got lots of these different options.

Choose this gun metal one down here.

That looks fun doesn't it.

And again I could paint this on in one location.

Maybe this bolt here for some reason is gun metal and you can mask out areas.

I can go into this layer and start editing it.

Maybe the foot has some metal as well for some weird reason and you can see this is great fun isn't it.

So you can see the kind of functionality it's got there just in the textures and that's one of the things that most interests me.

The ease of doing that compared to something like Blender where you have to set up all these smart materials yourself and it's very difficult to have that kind of layer function with masks which 3D Coat does really well.

And if you're wondering it has an extensive library of smart materials, PBR materials and so forth.

Now the thing that's new to 3D Coat 2024 is the new app link.

So I can go from Blender to 3D Coat and back to Blender really easily.

So I've got my monkey that I want to texture.

I can press N on my keyboard and with the 3D Coat app installed I can go across to the app link and press send.

Then when I open up 3D Coat you should see this import object for per pixel painting.

It asks you the size of the maps that you want.

I'll go for 2k and press ok.

So now I can use one of my smart materials, let's say this metal just here.

When I click on that it asks me to create a curvature map and it will bake out these maps for me.

So after a couple of seconds you can see my material preview here.

Maybe this blue one, right fill entire layer.

So I could go to the brass now.

This one asks for an ambient occlusion layer so I can press ok.

Set the ambient occlusion parameters.

I'll just press ok and I'll just paint some random brass over here.

I'll just turn the opacity up to 100% so I can have a nice brass material over here.

I could turn off this material preview and start painting all over the place with some brass.

Then when I'm happy I can go file, open in external app and it tells me all the textures that it's changed is millimeters to meters I think.

So it doesn't come in really huge.

Export, then go back across Blender, click on the get back, go across to the shading workspace and you can see it's got my painted model there with all the textures set up which you can see just there.

So another really impressive feature there.

Now another reason I like 3d coat and where Blender's slightly lacking is the use of layers and not only layers we have layer masks and clipping masks.

So not only can you build up your painting in layers and be able to turn off and on the layers or adapt just that layer, you can also use clipping masks so you only affect a certain area.

If you use Photoshop at all then you'll be used to clipping masks and they work in very much the same way.

Another area that looks really helpful and useful is the automatic retopology tools.

It's not something I've had much of a chance to play with yet but from this demonstration here they look exceptional.

The those that are particularly scared of retopology they've got an automatic tool.

This has similarities to something like quad remesher and again looks very impressive. 3d coat is also known for its great sculpting capability.

Many compare it to Zbrush.

It can deal with very high density meshes and really fine details and obviously combined with other things like the retopology it works very well.

I must admit I found the brushes to be a little bit more refined.

I know you can edit the brushes in blender and so forth but in certain ways 3d coat has edged this one.

One really clever feature was the VDM pick and paste tool.

Kind of like the clone stamp brush for VDM textures.

You can take a sculpted portion of a mesh, copy it and paste it onto a different part of the mesh and because 3d coat is voxel based it did deal with VDM brushes particularly well.

It's also got a nice library of alpha brushes as well.

Another feature that's new to me is this idea of volumetric painting.

So you can have different layers and different PBR materials with those layers.

So when you sculpt down into an object you can have a different PBR underneath.

You can imagine that's really good for a creature with blood and veins underneath the skin or in some of these examples a concrete block with damage and a different PBR texture representing that.

And the last one I want to focus on another really interesting one again new to me is normal map to mesh.

So you can take your normal maps and then turn it into a sculpted mesh.

I can think of loads of use cases for this and I'm really impressed that they've managed to figure this one out.

Now there are lots of features that I've not mentioned.

They've got things like live boolean, they've got these interesting things called fractures, basically complex texturing, clever things like tiling textures that rotate so they don't look like tile textures.

But these are just the things that I'm excited about in 3D Coat 2024.

It really is a huge program.

Now there's different ways of purchasing 3D Coat.

You can have a permanent license for 379 euros, you get 12 months of free updates and then you can make a yearly update for just 45 euros with the next 12 months of free updates.

You've got things like a rent to own option as well and you can see the options and prices there.

The monthly subscription is just over 20 euros and that's a cancel anytime and you get all the updates of course.

Now as well as 3D Coat, there's an option of Textura.

So it's a slimmed down version of 3D Coat mainly for texture painting, permanent license being 120 euros or a monthly subscription of 10.

Now there is an educational version where you can get 3D Coat Textura for free but there's no commercial use allowed.

So that's 3D Coat 2024 and I'm quite excited to see how it fits into my workflow.

I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and I think it's going to be a great advantage for my 3D models.

I'm really interested to hear from anybody that's using 3D Coat with Blender at the moment.

Let me know how you're getting on and how you use it and as always if you've got any questions or thoughts then do comment below.

Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.