http://www.3d-coat.com/

Rick and I are just playing with this in work - seems to have a cool featureset and for the price certainly could do a few things very very well - enough to justify the price, anyway.

3D paint - retopo tools - sculpting - PSD layers - a whole bunch of stuff:

Be warned though - the UI is programmer art and pretty grim.... but once you find it hidden in a submenu, you might just find it very useful...

Mike

Yeah, I was just looking at this yesterday, want to play with it some, see how it performs.

An older thread.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=52659

Not really sold on it, for a little more you can a lot more, in either Mudbox or ZBrush.

The Re-Topo tools are interesting but I already have ways of handling that efficiently.

It suffers from some of the same ui issues Zbrush does. If I was going to have a bear of a time learning one or the other I'd have to pick the expanded feature set and mountains of documentation for ZBrush.

The gallery examples are not that amazing, I see a lot of;
Dino's: Dino skin is one of the easiest kinds of very forgiving detail, see the mudbox2009 frog painting demo. Hopefully the dino examples are pointing to its modeling prowls?
Bugs black/grey fill + spec, ding done!
Aliens classic hallmark of "every time I try to make a pretty human it comes out alien"
and
Poorly painted faces. Not sure how much of that is the app holding the artist back or the other way around.

Maybe its too early to tell, maybe this is just the first step in many to come. Rick wasn't wrong about Silo so I'll keep checking on this one. It's worth watching this one grow when the titans are not thrashing about making headlines.

The 3D painting seems to be coming out best here: could still do with a lot more finesse (and options) but its nice and fast and seems initially better - for example - for seam overpaints etc. than going to zbrush/zapplink...

Needs more of a battering i think

The Painting is pretty solid and even has a zapplink feature that works with all layers. Support for psd layers is awesome in fact. The retopo tools gather together all the best features from other programs. The sculpting needs more work, but there is an update coming in a few weeks apparently that will add volumetric sculpting to the mix, which might just up the game in that area.

I've decided to buy it just for the paint and retopo tools for now, but I want to play around some more with the sculpting to see what I can do with it anyway. You can paint directly to the normal map with depth info - which might be more useful once Andrew adds better support for working with low rez meshes (also coming soon).

If you haven't been following this software, this guy is a friggin machine. The updates have been coming fast and furious since it was released not too long ago. 64 bit and cuda support also on their way, which will give it a massive performance boost.

Make suggestions on the forum, andrew is pretty good at answering and implementing new features that way. Hell I submitted a bug report a few demos back and he sent me a new .exe with a fix when it wouldn't run on vista 64. That's pretty cool. I've only seen response like that from Nevercenter with Silo in the past. Definitely worth keeping your eye on this one.

Originally Posted by Gwot

You can paint directly to the normal map with depth info - which might be more useful once Andrew adds better support for working with low rez meshes (also coming soon).

This is something that i've been wanting to see out of an app for a long time. It just seems like common sense. If you could crank out your Low-Medium freq. details, bake that down, then load up your lowpoly and be able to use the same sculpt/paint tools to create the high freq. detail. Seems like a much better solution that needing to create some 25 million poly mesh just for little details.

Those retopo tools look fantastically simplistic to use... I definitely need to give this a whirl, thanks for the heads up on this one guys.

I'm gonna give the demo a try, I've been wanting someting to make painting models easier. Maybe even just as a hack/slash combo with photoshop. Mainly for seams ands stuff, haven't tried mudbox either yet so this could be good.

Painting from a photo worked really well in it - place the mesh over the image and zoom/rotate either the image or the mesh to line them up, then simply paint that image directly onto your mesh.

Realtime painting of specular values is great, but I want to play with it more.

It's a helluva lot more intuitive that Zapplink, and the painting engine (with MULTI LAYER PSD SUPPORT!!!11one) is worth the money alone.

I'd like to see it get a an overhaul in the UI front (too many options and menus, it almost like Blender). There are 6 or 7 load/import/merge options which could be drastically reduced (this is something I can't praise Silo for enough).



Oh, it's Mac and PC.

I think the UI is more a result of such a rapid development pace. For the most part it works, but it needs refinement for sure. Will be interesting to see how it evolves now that more professionals are starting to play with it and give feedback. Andrew seems pretty open to doing whatever it takes to make the user base happy with it. I want to play with some keybinds and such more before I make any suggestions myself.

I've been playing with the Mac version tonight, and it's got some quite nice retopology tools. It feels a little clunky in places, but as Gwot says it could evolve very quickly with more production artists giving it a go.

If you're looking for purely retopology, there is Topogun. Just sign up for the beta, and have fun. I haven't used it in awhile, but for characters it is awesome. http://www.topogun.com/

New alpha version of 3.0 with some volumetric sculpting tools to play with is available in the forum.

Oh nice! We just bought a few copies.

Bought myself a copy of this too. It still has loads of little issues that I hope don't get overlooked now that Andrew is crashing on with the Volumetric sculpting in Alpha 3.0. I hope to see..

-Better integration of PSD files (currently it doesn't always keep layer order on reimport.)
-More solid mesh recapture in the Retopology tools (doesn't currently match Topogun on this one.)
-Paint tools are a bit flaky still as it works on a type of subdivided vertex painting system instead of uv space. here
-faster brush speed, currently it doesn't always produce smooth results.
-colour spec.

having said that it does many other things well so I can forgive them.

Originally Posted by ghib

-Better integration of PSD files (currently it doesn't always keep layer order on reimport.)
-Paint tools are a bit flaky still as it works on a type of subdivided vertex painting system instead of uv space. here
-faster brush speed, currently it doesn't always produce smooth results.
-colour spec.

having said that it does many other things well so I can forgive them.

Yeah, same here, but i'm waiting for these to buy.
Plus :
- Meshes with PSD assigned doesn't load with the PSD
- We can't paint on alpha channel in PSD yet
- Brushes engine isn't well finished and comprehensive yet

Does it still have the Little Jesus warning?

There's some personal belief/non-lewd materials request during install if that's what you mean... but like any eula, I pretty much ignored it. It has no effect on me using the program at all so who cares? Odd thing to include though I thought.

Well yeah I see your point, I guess I should give the prog a try no matter what ; and I think I indeed tried it some time ago when it was called differently.

I just felt personally offended when reading that eula - why would the software author want to impose personal beliefs on his userbase? I just don't get it, that's quite disrespectful of other people beliefs if you ask me (no matter what they are).

Agreed, but I did the same thing as Gwot. If anything, it's incredibly naïve of the creator. I'm not easily offended by someone trying to impose their beliefs on me, as it happens far too often.

I'd think a company could potentially see issue with it, though.

Whats the regular price of it? It says $120 now, until September 15th, if its really that good, and is really going to go back up a lot, I might snatch a copy of it before it does...

Searched for "price" on their forum

Upgrade to 3.0 will not be free. 2.00 was released almost year ago and since that time we had 10 free updates, every of them was really big.
So, 3.0 is not free especially because of it's neew features. But upgrade will cost

Price_of_3 - 120 + Add_value
Add_Value is approx 20$

Price_of_3 will be approximately 180-200 at start point and will grow then.
After 15 of september price will grow slightly, maybe 140-150.

Originally Posted by pior

Well yeah I see your point, I guess I should give the prog a try no matter what ; and I think I indeed tried it some time ago when it was called differently.

I just felt personally offended when reading that eula - why would the software author want to impose personal beliefs on his userbase? I just don't get it, that's quite disrespectful of other people beliefs if you ask me (no matter what they are).

I can't remember what the exact statement was exactly but I'm sure the jest of it was just a plea not to create controversially lied/distasteful work, not to pirate is software, and be good to one another?
It ain't no biggie, or something to get worked up over if u ask me. I can't see anything wrong with asking that of people. But that’s just me & my 2 cents.

I hope I am not derailing the thread too much. But then again, it's written in the text that one needs to 'agree' with when installing the app.

GetDown, my problem lies exactly here. What if someone wants to make some kind of art statement through a distasteful or controversial piece? Not everything is spacemarine or CareBear. Asking for a certain type of artwork and not another is quite naive, like Pea said. This text sure has no weight whatsover, but I just have that one weird chill down my spine when I read it! By this I am not saying I feel offended in my beliefs ; mostly offended by how the software author considers that one type of art is right, and not another. I am fine with him believing it; but asking users to share this point of view *is* being disrespectful to them.

Can't wait to try the demo tho haha!

I think I'll look into this one closer. I tried the demo before, but gave up on it too quickly I believe.

As for the EULA. We know that unreasonable EULAs (such as this one) never hold up in court if it would come to that. I have to say the devil in me kind of wants to break it on purpose just for the hell of it..