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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

Finally the ubershader! If anyone visually inclined wants some serious head candy I warmly recommend buying 3DCoat and using that for texturing and Blender for rendering (and modeling) Once you know how to model it's astounding how fast you can turn shit from your imagination into something photorealistic. It's almost like magic nowadays... You need a beefy GPU to thoroughly enjoy it or lots of cores, though, to tune the lighting in real time.

It's sculpting and miniature painting and photographing and it's such fun!

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3DCoat is a specialized voxel sculpting application, quite unlike Blender - it's a waste to use it for mere texturing!

Once you get the hang of it, voxel modeling (3DCoat's version) is really intuitive and provides certain results much more efficiently than NURBS (non-uniform rational b-splines), SDS (subdivision surfaces) or SCG (solid constructive geometry).

I'm not putting down Blender at all - these two packages greatly complement each other!

Ah, so true. But, given an existing unwrapped Blender model the superb texturing capabilities are astounding. I don't have to think about specular maps, bump maps, diffuse maps etc as distinctive assets anymore. I can just paint with friggin stone, metal and dirt and scratches with data that is transferable to several rendering packages.

Other packages do offer this but the affordable price of 3DCoat make it an exceptional option for hobbyists (IMO).

3D-Coat is a fairly fully featured model creation package. It has very good texturing facilities, not as good as Substance or Modo, but very good.

Actually the single best feature in 3D-Coat is its UV unwrapping and editing functionality.

Try the Substance suite if you want an actually good texturing program. Very affordable licensing, too, with an optional license-to-own pricing model.

Coming from 'old school' texturing pipeline with hand assembled specular, normal etc. maps to get something akin to realism by just painting with the selected material and having the program automatically fill in the various channels feels amazing. I was not really pushing the program but the workflow enabled by it. If substance works as well that's cool to know.

Thanks for the tip! I downloaded the trial and it seems really nice.

Sure thing! After you spend a few days with it, I'd love to hear how you compare it to 3DCoat. I've considered picking up 3dCoat not for its texturing but its voxel workflow.

Substance Painter is also a great option for texturing, costs a lot less and is extremely popular among biggest game developers.

Lot less? Cheapest 3DCoat licence seems to be 99 dollars while the Substance painter costs 145. The non-limited 3DCoat is more expensive, sure.

Wait for the Black Friday sale or a Steam sale to buy Substance Painter. It should be significantly cheaper.

Also, Substance Painter works on Linux which is important for some people.

3dcoat is also available for Linux.

The cheapest 3DCoat license prohibits any commercial use. The less restrictive license costs a lot more.

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