3D-Coat 4.5: Powerful digital engraving software！

3D-Coat 4.5

3D-Coat is the one application that has all of the tools that you need to take your 3D idea from a block of digital clay all the way to a production ready, fully textured, organic or hard surface model.

 

This model was textured in 3D-Coat 4.5 using smart materials and physically based rendering:

Voxel Sculpting

Start sculpting without restriction using voxel technology - no worries about topology.

Voxel sculpting allows you sculpt without any topological constraints and create complex details out of thin air! You can dynamically change your sculpture, fundamentally, without worrying about topology. This approach gives you an absolute feeling of freedom in sculpting. It is not based on surface deformation but on volume building and filling. Feel like a true artist here, don't think about polygons and structure, just express yourself as an artist!

Traditional and Volumetric Sculpting Comparison

•      Traditional sculpting can result in stretched polygons.

•      Larger alterations to the topology can be difficult, (if not impossible), with traditional sculpting tools.

A True Artist's Tool

Artists want to draw, to sculpt, to create - the last thing they want to think about is the geometry of an object.

They want to focus more of their time on form and texture, and less on polygons and edge flow.

They want to feel like an Artist, rather than an engineer.

 

Volumetric Sculpting Principles

Voxels are dots in spg.jpace with a value between 0 and 1

A marching cubes algorithm allows you to modify the actual volume of an object rather than just the surface.

 

Voxel Operations Examples

Voxel Sculpting Example: Coral Reef

Using “Move”

Cutting holes

Merging objects

Pay particular attention to the moray eel and the tentacles on the jelly fish

3D-Coat has a powerful system of curve manipulation

 

Voxel Sculpting Example

You can use any closed OBJ file as a profile

You can create basic forms very quickly

You can put details on objects (chains, hoses, stitches, rivets, buckles, etc.)

Hair Example

Hair is also made using curves.

Curves can be merged at the pen location or be positioned arbitrarily in space.

Tools

In addition to voxel operations, there are a full set of tools that are familiar to ZB/MB users.

Surface deformation with masking, fine detailing, etc.

Transpose – Adjusting the object's position, local rotation, translation, and scaling.

Technical Considerations

Manipulating hundreds of millions of voxels require a highly organized dataflow.

Our voxel optimization routines allow a complex voxel model to be created with the same amount of RAM as a similarly structured polygonal model.

20 million voxel polygons can easily be manipulated, even without hardware acceleration, (CUDA).

Using CUDA

NVidia CUDA is supported as an option for voxel calculation acceleration.

NVidia 8, 9, 2 series

Even an inexpensive NVidia graphics card (120$ - 220$) can increase acceleration 4-7 times

Render

Realtime (up to 50 million triangles)

User created shaders

Offline rendering

A sculpture can be easily Retopologized and Textured

Rendering by Deadman21

 

Painting With Layers

Create photo-realistic textures for your models with as many layers and blending effects as you need.

Per pixel painting is a fast and precise painting approach. Allows layered color and displacement painting over low-poly and high-poly meshes without initial geometry distortion. With this method you can paint directly on your mesh to a texture map, this is ideal for low-poly game assets. You can import a normal map to use as a guide.

These images demonstrate normal map baking from high- to low-poly model, and texturing with layers of color, specular, bump (depth).

Painting in 3D-Coat has full-featured layer functionality

UV-Mapping

UV-mapping has never been so easy! You can create or edit existing UV sets with an intuitive and flexible set of tools.

 

If your 3D model doesn't have a UV-set or you want to change an existing one or you've just retopologized your voxel sculpture and like to make a UV-set you are able to do all these things right within 3D-Coat in a very fast way.

3D-Coat offers powerful tools for making and editing UV-sets. You can edit separate UV islands, faces, edges or vertices. There is a possibility to manage several UV-sets.

Three unwrapping algorithms: ABF++, LSCM and Planar

Three display types: No checker, Simple checker, Complex checker

 

Retopology

Create new topology from scratch or adjust existing topology with the most powerful set of tools in the industry!

Auto-Retopology

Revolutionary to the Industry! Auto-retopology, (AUTOPO), with user defined guides for accurate edge loops. Use a convenient wizard to help you identify desired areas of mesh density and to define the flow of edge loops.

 

Non-connected objects are supported.

Import you objects directly for AUTOPO from the "File/Import" menu. It will automatically close holes, convert to voxels, and create a practical, organized mesh.

AUTOPO automatically cleans up any non-manifold topology to avoid any subsequent problems

Total number of triangles, quads and n-gons are visible in the Retopo Room. Each polygon type can be individually selected, for clarification and identification.

Vertex picking in retopo room has been improved.

 

Manual Retopology Toolset

 

Retopo Creature in 3d Coat

Live demo of manual retopology made by Juan Carlos Montes

 

Licensing

Professional

Floating

Educational

 

System Requirements

OS: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8; OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later; Linux

CPU: 1.2 GHz or better

RAM: 512Mb (4096 recommended)

Video: Radeon 9600/Nvidia 5600 128Mb (256 recommended) or better

DirectX 9.0c or better for Windows, OpenGL 2.0 for MacOS