3D Coat or Substance Painter?

In terms of performance, system requirements and overall looks of ones future in big CGI industry which software for texturing would you guys prefer? 3D Coat or Substance Painter?

3D Coat:
Less resource consumption. Little bit too expensive. Artists that like to hand-paint textures will find 3D Coat’s brush tools more powerful to work with. But some of the tools are very interesting and if one understand how to use, it makes 3D Coat a multi-tool when comes to 3D, not just texturing.

Substance Painter:
Demands resources of your computer, a lot of calculation and waits for complex materials and their layering. Very affordable for 20 dollars a month, indie license. Has a standard material format and also have a subscription based material library for artists to access. The painting tools in Substance Painter however is very basic, not much options to control your pen strokes or be very precise. However, the layering is much better than 3D coat, and more intuitive. It doesn’t have any ability to manipulate the 3D mesh, and it is a tool solely to produce textures, and it’s really good at it, especially PBR textures.

The AAA CGI industry is going to be dominated by Substance Painter in the future, but 3D Coat has its place for more stylized projects. Company like Blizzard employs a lot of artist that uses 3D coat. I prefer Substance Painter, but I wish it had a better, and more tweakable brush system like 3D Coat.

So basically, if you can & are able, use both to your advantage :eyebrowlift2:

& Just Wow :eek:

What’s New in 3D-Coat 4.8

                                  <b>Key Features:</b>                 
                                   - <b>Possibility to attach Smart Materials to layers!</b>                 
                                   Materials managing becomes even easier                 
                                   <b>- Smart Materials usage history. </b>                 
                                   <b>- Possibility to change resolution of textures, attached materials will automatically be re-sampled!</b>                 
                                   <b>- Improved Curvature calculation. </b>This is crucial for Smart Materials to be looking even more realistic.                 
                                   <b>- Render scene in Renderman. </b>Yep, you heard it right!                 
                                   <b>- Baking Scan. Paint baking depth with brush.</b>                 
                                   Now you can define with an ease of a brush stroke how big the depth of scanning will be.                 
                                   <b>- New Primitives in Retopo room: cylinder, torus, cube, ellipse, spiral, etc.</b>                 
                                   We are getting closer and closer to low-poly modeling!                 
                                   <b>- 4K monitors support. </b>Now UI elements and font size will automatically fit your screen resolution.                 
                                   <b>- Proxy Slider. </b>Set your proxy degree with an easy slider movement.                 
                                   <b>- Rotation mode quick switch - around Y or free rotation. </b> See navigation panel.                 
                                   Need both modes at hand? Now you have the quick swap.                 

more on 3DCoat Release Notes 4.8

Anyone using or testing can share impression & experience with this latest version?

Am also very interested, mostly in fast & easy workflow for texturing/surfacing with Smart materials. Rendering with PRMan seems a nice bonus (if it’s a one click to render process) :smiley: