CGenie - Professional CG Textures

Multi-talented guest writer for CGenie Xen Wildman reviews the latest version of 3D-Coat. Read on to see what he thought of this rapidly growing sculpting and painting application, and find out where this application could fit best within your workflow.

3D Coated

Voxels (volumetric pixels) are nothing new to the industry. We've had opportunity to render and sculpt them in the past (using pricey apparatus) even with haptic feedback. Enter '3D-Coat', a small piece of software with huge amounts of potential. This application has very humble beginnings but the scope is impressive and the price is hard to ignore.

So what makes 3D-Coat special? At version 3.0, 3D-Coat has already seen a few iterations and had its share of polygon pushing. It's not exactly new, however it is the newcomer. Prior versions of 3DC as well as its competitors have traditionally allowed for sculpting of very complex polygon models. Interaction with the model is bound only by the law of polygon modeling, namely, topology. There is always at least a small amount of planning/modeling involved before a sculpt. This is where 3DC decided to break away from the pack with voxel interaction.

CUDA Woulda Shoulda

Voxel sculpting means pushing millions of points around while turning on and off little switches as the surface occupies that space. Imagine a three-dimensional lattice or grid with each cross representing a single point. That point can be on or off to represent the surface of an object. The higher the resolution/density, the finer the definition you get from your model. Sounds heavy doesn't it? Well, it is.

These days, video cards have been computing teraflops (not to be confused with triceratops) worth of calculations. One of the leading graphics chip companies, NVIDIA, has been pressing for GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) development with their CUDA platform. Heavy processing applications like scientific research, video transcoding, protein folding and yes, voxel sculpting can now harness this huge amount of floating point performance. 3D Coat takes advantage of CUDA for surface deformation and there's a noticeable acceleration over the CPU.

Take 2! (Documentation)

There are very few applications, if any, out there (of this complexity) that are so intuitive the user knows what to do just by looking at it. That would be the grail of interface design, utopia... it just doesn't exist baby. Instead, we can do our best to design and document the tools/techniques and hope the user 'gets it'. I'm a fan of written documentation supplemented with videos demonstrating the action. This is opposed to purely written text or a 4-hour lecture on video.

3D-Coat has something just as good - short videos with small packets of learning material. After all, that is the way we consume anything. The information is there, the delivery however is slightly lacking. The demonstrator (monotone) some-time-s... feels-as-though he is stum-bl-ing through the lecture without any life in his words. This makes it hard to watch at times. A couple extra takes could fix that.

You-I?

...it's an application with a few killer tools that with time and a little polish could become a 'killer app'

The user interface is not too convoluted by default but it still feels like a work in progress. The layout itself is quite comfortable and customizable. There is very little glitz here and that is a good thing. The primary focus is on your own creation.

Navigation is a very important part of 3d. Being able to move around your model/scene quickly and efficiently will make or break your workflow. In this sense, 3DC does very well. Zoom, pan, orbit, brush resize and intensity can all be done fluidly using just the tablet (or mouse).

Workflow

Voxel sculpting within 3D-Coat is as simple and grabbing a brush and waving it around. As you can can expect, there are a lot of similarities in the toolset as other digital sculpting applications such as build and pinch etcetera. The inherent advantage of voxels however is that you can keep building on a maquette and extending the model without disturbing the rest of the surface. This would make 3D-Coat to creature massing what Sketchup is to architectural massing.

Topology Accepted

While it's easy to continue adding detail to a voxel maquette generating literally millions of polygons' worth of data, you will soon realize that there are limitations. Even a CUDA-enabled PC (mine is a quad-core 3.4ghz with 8gb ram and a NVIDIA GTX 280) will suffer after 50M polygons. On top of that, since voxel polygons are evenly distributed, you will get less detail from more polygons instead of being able to focus them in high-detail areas. This is the inherent advantage to polygon sculpting. Ideally, the best approach is a hybrid workflow. Mass out your model in voxels and then once you're down to the detailing portion, 're-topologize' and finish up using pure polygons and normal map painting. This method yields pretty good results, but if you need to go into extreme detail, you can take your new poly object into ZBrush or Mudbox. 3D-Coat fits well into the pipeline.

3D-Coat sports some of the smartest re-topology tools I have seen. Utilize techniques such as simple brush strokes that later turn into polygon mesh, or for finer control you can place vertices with a tool that also auto-detects and fills them in with a simple right click. It's also possible to texture in 3D-Coat and paint diffuse, normal maps and specular maps simultaneously. The toolset includes all the usual suspects along with a few gems like cavity painting and a direct link to Adobe Photoshop for projection paint.

Conclusion

As with all new technology, 3D-Coat's voxel sculpting suite is not without bugs. Some of the workflow still needs to be streamlined and there are tools that also need similar attention. While this isn't a deal-breaker, it does change my recommendation to make 3D-Coat an initial part of the modeling pipeline instead of the whole thing.

As it stands, 3D-Coat is a great companion to other sculpting programs and 3d software alike. Able to stand on its own though a little wobbly, it's an application with a few killer tools that with time and a little polish could become a 'killer app'. 3D-Coat is shaping up to be the ground zero to your character and organic design pipeline.