3d Coat Hand Painting

[Pablo Tatts]

Ive only used 3D coat for retopology purposes and I was wondering if the experienced folk around here could share what makes 3D Coat such a powerful tool for hand-painted texturing. Doesn't Substance Painter offer as much options for this type of texture work?

No, Substance Painter offer less options for hand painting. For example in 3d coat you can Shift select several brush dabs and paint them randomly/ alternatively . 3dcoat also has a kind of "roll" brush that could use long picture that you can roll along brush stroke , like Zbrush. It also have a spline tool you can draw along perfectly. Projectile painting is also more convenient in 3d coat.

Iirc 3dCoats Photoshop link supports sending back and forth camera projection while keeping layers (with some caveats probably). I imagine people who are at home in photoshop (use custom brushes) might like this.

Its not so great if you have to hide seams because you are painting restricted to 2d space, but probably for a lot of models if you had some specialized painting software you like, this might be viable. Something I'll try with artrage at some point because it gives such a great oil painting look with no effort.

And this applier is convenient only when it's your own materials and you know how they work, what's the math behind them and what all the tweaks do exactly . Otherwize it's a huge undeciferable mess of sliders you would spend forever to move around doing miss an hit and it's never what you need so the actual painting is just a way to fix that mess.

To me substance has a more "industrial" approach of art tools like, enabling an "artist" to repeat easily the same task over and over again in a big production pipeline. Don't get me wrong, of course I know there's also a lot of handpainters that loves the substance toolset.

But when 3DCoat has a more "artistic tools", which offers user to really express the way he wants, getting quite rid of the mess of a pile of unstable layers to just apply one color and instead, offering the right tool to just, well, paint the material you want per stroke. Like if you want, you can do the whole texturing job in a single layer, it's okay. Or use tons of them, it's up to you and you can kinda articulate your workflow to the non-destructive level you need (I, for example, don't need to have a non-destructive armor metal surface, but I need to be able to paint several clans warpaints over it and benefit of pretty basic features like curvature, AO, or even use these with custom textures to get a precise style I love to work with). At some point it offers way more freedom, but this goes with the risk to loose continuity over a bunch of artists if they don't follow a precise guideline and/or don't have a good trained eye, while again, substance gives you few tools, already made materials, you just apply and it's good enough most of the time.

(I personnally love using 3DCoat when it comes to texturing, I've only used substance painter when production required it at all costs and it was never a good moment haha, so I guess my opinion may be oriented towards 3DCoat a bit much)

I think of my painted coats as animated objects which can move about in the world - walking in the street, sitting at a bar, coming through a doorway, emerging from a car... Each coat is like no other - they are one of a kind artworks you can wear or hang on the wall. I'm inspired by images from popular culture (comics, advertising, historical paintings, trash, lettering found everywhere, and images from my films and watercolors). I love to juxtapose multiple images to create a chain of association to the viewer, much like my paintings but simpler - and I hope a coat will make someone happy - that the positive energy from the coat will surround the wearer and surprise those who see it.

She's an accomplished filmmaker, artist and designer. When I first saw the surreal meets graffiti meets pop-wearable masterpieces by Suzan Pittit was during my recap of the House of Byfield runway show for Art Hearts Fashion, NYFW. They caught my eye and I was captivated. Next, Suzan was...

Anastasia Shedu prepared an extensive breakdown of her stylized project Toro & Spirits: modeling, unwrapping, and animation in Blender, texturing and painting in 3D Coat and Photoshop, and rendering in Marmoset Toolbag.

As a creative child, I always knew I wanted to connect my life with art, and my strong drawing skills and love for games prompted me the path of a 2D artist. I enrolled at the University of Film and Television in Moscow, where I studied computer graphics, 2D animation, and fine arts.

That all changed with the release of Spyro, a remaster of my favorite childhood game. I just fell in love with its visual style and decided to embrace my passion for stylized art. And in the summer of 2019, still impressed by the game, I decided to become a 3D artist, just so I could create similar worlds someday.

I had some experience with 3ds Max, which I was studying for concept art, so I already knew something about 3D. I was even more excited when I found many talented and successful stylized 3D artists on Twitter. I took all my passion and inspiration and started learning game art on my own, finding helpful tutorials online. However, I cannot call myself fully self-taught, as my 2D experience and education in fine arts gave a huge boost to my work, especially in the hand-painted style.

When it comes to picking a concept, I try to keep in mind what I would like to learn and what techniques I would like to try while working on it. For example, in my previous work based on Haejoo's concept, I studied a hand-painting style where all lighting is drawn directly on the diffuse. Now I wanted to practice a different approach, where the diffuse represents the neutral color of the props, and the lighting is set by the actual lamps in the renderer. The advantage of the second approach is that the same assets can be placed in completely different lighting scenarios, while the first one can look really painterly with more nuanced lighting.

Another factor that influenced my workflow was the use of Marmoset Toolbag as the renderer for this scene. This required some planning regarding the number of lights, some shaders, and the output file format.

For modeling, I use Blender. Version 2.8 with an updated interface came out just when I switched to 3D, and I decided to give it a try. I fell in love! From the UI to the hotkey-based workflow, working in Blender feels really artistic and fun to me.

The candles were made from cylinders with basic extruding. I decided to make the cap separately so I could add more details without worrying about how to fit it all into the geometry of the candle. I modeled the most prominent shapes, leaving small details for the texturing.

The smoke unwrapping required a bit of work. I knew I wanted to animate the smoke in Marmoset Toolbag using the Offset Texture animation, so I made sure the smoke texture stretches from one edge of the texture space to the other. In addition, the UV island of the smoke is rectangular, and the geometry of the smoke itself tapers towards the end. Thus, I managed to create the illusion that the smoke is narrowing and dissolving.

To create transparency for the moss, I turned off Layer 0 and adjusted the base layer with an eraser. Then I started painting textures on another layer, which was clipped to the base one. When done, I added some color variation using a brush in a Color mode. I applied the same approach to the grass.

When it comes to hand-painted assets (and 3D in general), fundamentals are just as important as they are in 2D. Therefore, the study of light, color, shape, anatomy, and composition is essential. Always go from large shapes to medium and only then to detail, and this is true for both modeling and texturing.

After I finished the basic textures and got the idea of the style and color composition of my work, I moved on to Photoshop and started painting plants in the Targa file, where I left some space beforehand.

First, I drew the silhouettes of each plant, and then, with locked transparency, I drew their details. After that, I selected the entire layer by clicking the layer icon while holding down the Ctrl key, went to the channels panel, and filled the alpha channel with white by pressing the Alt + Del combination. This way I copied the silhouette of the flowers and used it to create a transparency map.

When I was done with the textures, I started modeling the plants in Blender. First I had to cut them out. To do this, I made a separate plane with the texture of the plants and cut everything out with the Knife tool. Next, I assembled several variations of grass, clover, and bellflower. After that, all I had to do was just duplicate the needed plant and position it in the scene, using the Simple Deform modifier if I wanted it to bend.

After finishing the plants, I moved on to animation. This was my first experience with 3D animation, before that, I did 2D animation in After Effects and briefly worked as an assistant animator, where I drew in-between frames for a traditional hand-drawn cartoon.

Animating the plants was a bit more challenging than I expected. I followed the tutorial I mentioned above, but due to the fact that I first put all the plants in their places and then animated them, the process took longer, since I had to set everything up individually.

For rendering, I used Marmoset Toolbag. The first thing I do is set up basic materials. I loaded the albedo maps, made them fully rough, and turned on transparency - Dither for moss, Add for smoke and candle glow (with the Include Diffuse checked), and Cutout for ground and vegetation.

I turned off Cull Back Faces on vegetation (except for some grass that uses doubled geometry), moss, glow and smoke so that Marmoset would render the backside. I also turned off Cast Shadows for the moss so that it blends better with objects and itself.

Candles also use Subsurface Scattering diffusion with a combination of Scatter, Translucency, and Fuzz. I also added a map to the roughness channel to make the tops of the candles shiny, like melted wax.

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