3D-Coat 4.9 - Upgrade to V4 from Older Version

3D-Coat 4.9 - Upgrade to V4 from Older Version (V2 or V3)

WHY 3D-COAT?

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. Feel like a true artist here, don't think about polygons and structure, just express yourself as an Artist!

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, which is ideal for low-poly game assets.

Retopology, Auto-retopology (AUTOPO) with user defined guides for accurate edge loops. Create new topology from scratch or adjust existing topology with the most powerful set of tools in the industry! 

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

Customizable interface. 3D-Coat has a professional customizable interface. Layout is broken on several separate rooms. Each room has own hotkeys set and dockable panels. You can easily make and store your own layouts.

Render your scenes with antialiasing, depth of field, ambient occlusion, alpha channel, and soft shadows. Make the turntables and share it with the community with easy-to-use Upload turntable wizard.

3D-Coat 4.5 Features List
 

Physically Based Rendering & Smart Materials:
Physically based rendering (PBR) is rendering of objects with some of material's properties being taken into account. Metals and non-metals (insulators) reflect and scatter light differently. Albedo, energy conservation, fresnel effect, and complex structure of relief also gives its influence into visual appearance of the surface.

 
Insulators are materials that have a pronounced diffuse scattering and weakly expressed specular (plastic, fabric , wood, concrete, paint and so on). Due to the diffuse scattering , we can see that the red plastic is red. And due to the reflection we can see glares on the surface.

Metals (steel, iron, gold, copper, brass, silver, etc) are materials without diffuse scattering (diffusion is always black), but clearly marked with a colored reflection. Copper has a black diffusion and strong reflection of red color. Gold has a black diffusion and a bright yellow reflection. Silver has a black diffusion and bright white reflection.
 

Layer groups: Now interaction with PS completely supported.

General case of Symmetry: Now all tools support new Symmetry. Presets also support Symmetry (optionally). Symmetry dialog is now popup and dockable.

Seamless painting over multiple UV meshes!

Bas-relief and Undercuts now have Tapering angle: It is useful for 3D-printing. 
 

AntiBump smoothing method: It allows to achieve ideally smooth surface even on a high-frequency details. AntiBump can be selected in a smoothing drop-down menu.
 
Paint Room Changes: Compatibility/GGX/Blinn-phong shading. Compatibility shading preserves colors as well as previous 3D-Coat's shading but is able to use advantages of PBR.

HDR support for panoramas.Panoramas will be auto-levelled. Included several panoramas in Panoramas/ folder, set other default panorama:
- Panorama manager included into navi panel. 
- Materials in 4.5 will not destroy 4.1 materials and vice versa. New materials have extension .pbrm instead of .xml. But if you want to use older materials - use Edit->Convert materials.
- View separate channels - color/specular color/gloss/metalness. 
- RMB over material allows to re-fill with the material all non-transparent area. It allows easy changing the material used for layer.
- Blending options for layers are organized better, operations separated into sections, gloss and metalness has now same options. 
- Quick access to layer's blending options - hover over layer, press small triangle that appears on the right. 
- 3D-Coat now can import object space normal maps (with auto conversion to tangent space). It guarantees normalmaps compatibility. 
- Normalmap layer may be locally magnified or reduced with Magnify tool. 
- Normalmapping standardized. Presets for normalmapping introduced. It is in Preferences, Import Dialog, Normalmap import dialog. It was a big investigation - usually software vendors does not share their methods of calculation of tangent space. So I was testing and checking a lot. 
- Normals/Tangentspace will be exported together with FBX, but in Maya you will need smooth normals from menu to show perfectly. Unity catches all well without additional actions (except it's own internal problems that we can't solve). 
- Realtime preview for Textures->Adjust->... Multi-threading optimization applied to adjust operations. 
- Improved interaction with photoshop in case of mirrored UV sets - you may paint on both of mirrored sides and they will be merged correctly. 
- View seams in paint room – bit.ly/1shKfFR 
- Seamlessness of ppp painting improved, interpolation of pixels from other side is more accurate.

Retopo / UV / Render Rooms Changes:
- Retopo with symmetry improved. Points will be automatically snapped and weld to the symmetry plane. It is especially important in non-virtual mirror mode.
- New Retopo tool - Scale. It scales clusters individually.
- Bevel, Select sharp edges got better dialog and realtime preview.
- Retopo menu is split in 2 parts - Retopo and Bake.
- Retopo groups has color palette now.
- Hardsurface AUTOPO disabled if 'voxelize' is turned ON in AUTOPO dialog.
- UV-sets names corrected - if symbol like “:” happens there - it will be replaced with “_” to be able to export textures correctly.
- UDIM naming for UV-sets supported with tiled import.
- Render room improved!

Sculpt Room Changes:
- Primitives UI changed to icon-based style:

- "Draw on plane" extended on Curves/Text/SnakeClay.
- Objectify functionality: removing small flying noise, unifying small pieces, decomposing to child volumes, sorting by size.
- Constructor tool introduced. It is Lego/Minecraft style of cell modeling - mainly aimed on children. Together with symmetry, Pose and Wrap it may help in more "serious" modeling as well.
- Rapid brush tweaked to work closer to previous version but bake advantage from newer approach. This is done to preserve compatibility with presets.
- Tapering introduced! Look icon near the radius control.
- Rapid/Claws corrected to be less bumpy (but still rigid).
- Noise tool introduced in Surface mode with realtime preview and infinite details. Pay special attention to anisotropic mode. It is good for natural stones. In Normal mode it's a good planet generator. This tool is only initial iteration for future noise tool, node editor expected there.
- Vertical Lathe curve.
- Pose tool got 3d lasso support.
- Chisel, Flatten brushes tuned a lot. Now they easily produce flat surface even under aggressive sculpting. It should work much more predictable.
- Primitives, Curves, Merge, Text parameters history window. It keeps history of primitives usage (Windows->Primitives history). It opens a way to non-destructive modeling. Further CutOff and possibly stroking history will be added.
- "Rotate along stroke" tuned to avoid trajectory twisting, many surface brushes got trajectory improvement that should lead to more predictable sculpting.
- Text primitive supports bending, text may be conformed to surface using bending with pen click or "Conform to surface" button. 
- Res+ in Surface mode subdivides whole mesh.
- VoxTree RMB -> Put on ground, Lay on ground (Object will be moved and rotated to get physically stable position on the ground).
- Toggle visibility / ghosting / isolate is in Geometry menu, hotkey may be assigned. 

Other features/tweaks/tunes:
- Swap YZ option in Preferences (to work with editors that has Z-axis up) globally exchanges Y and Z everywhere (in dialogs, naming, etc).
- Scripts updated a bit - naming in combo-boxes changed a bit for getting unique identifiers, some functions related to UV selection introduced, command line accessing.
- Scripts will not be paused on inactive windows.
- There is possibility to pick pivot point and axis directions in transform tool - bit.ly/1t1AqfN
- Rect/Ellipse drawing types in “E-panel” may become square if 'Q' pressed (may be changed in settings).
- Robot and Preview sphere models are included in the distributive.
- "Apply" overrides Enter in all tools.
- Rotate along stroke/strips does not lead to initial round spot in some tools.
- Better support of high-poly meshes import via File->Import for vertex painting. It works faster and requires less memory.
- Import images as mesh supports TIFF.
- Tangent space/triangulation options introduced in Preferences.
- GUI optimized a bit, FPS is increased.
- Improved alphas creation from pictures, inserted extended hint to describe how picture will be transformed to alpha. 
 And, of course, lots of bugfixes, tweaks, tuning, and polishing!