I use 3dcoat with Softimage. It works well for my needs. I don't use scanned data, but I understand the devs have put a fair amount of work into making it work well 3d printing and other scanning-related tasks. I've used it sporadically for several years now and I've been pretty happy with it overall. It has been well maintained with a very responsive dev team and frequent updates. They do not let crash bugs linger in the application for very long at all; the devs seem to usually fix and release updates to fix major bugs within a few weeks of being notified. It is not without flaws but the frequent updates make up for a lot. At this point it seems to be a stable tool and most bugs seem to be related to new features which they tend to add on a regular basis.
3DC generally works as expected with Softimage. I can create or import assets, export them as FBX, import them to Softimage with diffuse, spec, emissive and normal maps. Sometimes I create using the voxel tools, but often I will create using Softimage and use it only for texturing. When importing to Softimage, you have to set up the shader tree manually but I prefer this to Mudbox's integrated approach because it means you don't get a bunch of new materials or nodes created every time you push data to Softimage (perhaps this was a user error, but I found this a workflow killer when I trialed Mudbox). I made a good effort to try to get Mudbox to replace what 3DC does for me but the functionality just isn't the same and in the end I couldn't justify picking Mudbox over 3dc. I'd like to have both, but I'm not sure I'd really even use Mudbox over 3DC. I've had mixed results using the Applink approach to sharing data, and find myself choosing to just export/import FBX for this part of it. I generally work with pretty simple assets headed to my indie games and 3dc has a bunch of useful stuff for dealing with low-poly models that I find essential. It's a unique tool that solves some problems pretty well. The most useful thing for me is the UV toolset. The painting tools are pretty good but I find for game dev work the fixed number and types of texture channels to be a limitation worth mentioning - this is probably the biggest missing feature from my perspective. That being said, the painting features as they are now are still pretty good with a nice Photoshop type approach to layers and some limited layer effects and similar functions. The UI is handicapped a bit by being cross platform, for some people that's a good thing (it runs on Linux & Mac also) but for me I find the non standard window behavior slightly annoying. Its a lot more normal than ZBrush though. I was recently working with someone who is good with ZBrush and had started using 3DC for the first time to help with my last game, and he had generally positive things to say but one negative was that ZBrush tended to have better 'feel' and materials for painting voxels which I tend to agree with, but getting a good mesh out of the voxels was easier with 3DC. There is a *lot* more functionality in 3DCoat than a first impression will suggest, some very useful/important features are not advertised well and in many cases not documented as well as I think they should be. I've gone for years overlooking significant features that were only briefly mentioned in the docs which I'd say is the weakest part of the package. It's taken me a long time to discover many of the things that I now rely on, and I can see how someone who is just trialing it might overlook some things that might have convinced them to buy it and make it part of their toolset. 3DC is relatively inexpensive and if you can afford the time & money I'd say it's worth learning. -Eric Cosky -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tim Leydecker Sent: Friday, June 28, 2013 1:26 AM To: [email protected] Subject: softimage and 3Dcoat Applink Hi guys, anyone using 3dcoat with softimage here? How well do the voxel modeling tools work, would you consider it comfortable to use 3dcoat to clean up raw scan data (with holes) into solid volumes? Does 3dcoat play nicely with softimage in general? Anything you´d find important to point out? Cheers, tim
