I thinking of buying zBrush or 3d Coat, I can’t affor both right now.
Here’s what I’ve gathered about them:
3d coat is cost half as much, and seem to have much better texturing and hard surface sculpting tools.
Zbrush is more widely used in the industry and is the tool for sculpting especially organic objects.
Has anybody out there tried them both? What do you think I should get?
However you didn’t expose what you interests are about these apps.
Ok, what I want from them is a complement to blender for a game asset workflow. I find blenders sculpting, texture painting, retopology and UV editing tools lacking so I would like a program that can complement blender in these areas.
Zbrush alone will not handle painting much better than Blender does. Aside from being able to vertex paint on multires, it’s really no better. So you’ll want some other app (maybe substance painter or mari indie) as a companion. But that’s more money on top of what is already the more expensive solution. ZB’s retopo tools are pretty good, but they’re fairly focused on preparing sculpts for rigging and texturing, not so much realtime stuff. I don’t have much personal experience with 3DCoat myself (I went with the zbrush/substance painter combo), but it seems better suited to what you want. 3Dcoat has a demo, so you can always grab that and see what you think. Zbrush, unfortunately, doesn’t have a demo unless they added on recently.
I use 3D-Coat and like it a lot, it definitely compliments Blender. They just added PBR texturing to 3D-Coat that uses some procedural methods which is fun. Voxels are nice for setting up the starting mesh (especially when you need to do boolean operations) on which the details can be added using the surface mode. I have had good luck with the autopo function which automatically re-topologies the mesh and bakes the base textures for you (AO, depth, etc). It doesn’t work well with very complex meshes with a lot of voids or holes. But for the most part it works pretty well.
Most people seem to like how Zbrush’s sculpting works better than 3D-Coat’s, but I’m just a hobbyist so Zbrush is too expensive for what I do. I find 3D-Coats sculpting to be very similar to Blender’s, just with more tools and voxels of course.
I’d go with 3dCoat. I use it myself, and it is really powerful, and its painting is superior to Zbrush.
Also, I can tell you that this guy: http://www.izmeth.com/#!portfolio/
who worked for a long time in the game industry prefers 3dCoat over Zbrush. I talked to him about this, and in his opinion 3dCoat’s workflow is far easier and more fun than Zbrush.
Of course, you ought to download the trials of both, and make up your own mind.
Ok, what I want from them is a complement to blender for a game asset workflow.
My suggestion then. Go for 3D Coat.
Is 3d coat better than substance painter on texture painting when it comes to human models?