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Substance Painter or... What do you use to "paint" your custom models?

DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,388
edited March 2018 in The Commons

What do you use to texture and "paint" your custom models?

Have heard and read several very favorable recommendations for Substance Painter.  Am considering purchasing it.  However, it is not uncommon for me to purchase software and then discover later that there is some other software that does the same thing, and that this other software that I had never heard of is cheaper, does essentially the same things, and offers additional features, etc.  My ignorance holds even if I use the magical google, yahoo, bing,... search engines for reviews. 

So, what do you recommend?

Post edited by Diomede on

Comments

  • IllidanstormIllidanstorm Posts: 655

    I don't know since I don't use Substance Painter. But might want to take a look into Zbrush

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 40,085

    Carrara yes

     

    I do have Zbrush too though and it is pretty cool

    Carrara still can do multiple surfaces with overlapping UV's though which Zbrush cannot without masking to export them

  • McGyverMcGyver Posts: 7,085

    I bought 3D coat because it can turn a triangulated mesh into quads, and I can auto map and paint a model... Plus you can model in it... (But not as well as with Zbrush).

    But if you don't care to model and if you can map really well in other programs, or want to paint over models with existing maps, then those features of 3D Coat are mostly unimportant and Substance Painter is probably better.

    This was an old model I made in Sculptris (I think) and painted quickly in 3D Coat

     

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 108,072
    edited March 2018

    What are you wanting to paint? The Daz human figures, and other items that use UDIMs or stacked UV islands (more than one map applied to the model, each for a different set of surfaces, that overlap if you stack them up) don't, as far as I know, work in Substance Painter* (without reorganising the maps to fill a single UV square) and can be fiddly in ZBrush - 3D Coat does handle these well, as do Mudbox and Mari as far as I know. On the other hand Substance Painter does have a lot of strengths if the mapping isn't an issue.

    * the latest Allegorithmic newsletter did hae a link to a guide using instancing to handle a complex model, but I wasn't clear if that was a general solution to UDIM support or something totally different.

    Post edited by Richard Haseltine on
  • TangoAlphaTangoAlpha Posts: 4,587

    One advantage of Substance Painter is that the subscription model is in fact hire purchase. So when you've subscribed for long enough, you can convert it to fully owned.

  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,388
    edited March 2018
    th3Digit said:

    Carrara yes

    heartheart

    ​.

    Richard Haseltine said:

    What are you wanting to paint? The Daz human figures, and other items that use UDIMs or stacked UV islands (more than one map applied to the model, each for a different set of surfaces, that overlap if you stack them up) don't, as far as I know, work in Substance Painter* (without reorganising the maps to fill a single UV square) and can be fiddly in ZBrush - 3D Coat does handle these well, as do Mudbox and Mari as far as I know. On the other hand Substance Painter does have a lot of strengths if the mapping isn't an issue.

    * the latest Allegorithmic newsletter did hae a link to a guide using instancing to handle a complex model, but I wasn't clear if that was a general solution to UDIM support or something totally different.

    Thanks, good to know about the limits of Substance Painter.  Very helpful.  I will keep that in mind when uvmapping.

    I want to texture and paint models that I create and uvmap myself.  Not just directly paint, but also create surface textures and maps in general.  For example, if I create a silly scifi creature like the cyclopstritch in my avatar or a more serious prop like a child's little red wagon, I can currently texture and paint them to my heart's content in Carrara for easy posing and rendering in Carrara.  But since Daz appears to want us to migrate to Studio, my eventual workflow is likely to be from modeling in Hexagon/Silo/Blender/ZBrush or whatever to creating surface textures in ??? to loading and rendering in Studio (at least Daz hopes I render in Studio instead of Blender).  Looking to replace the ??? with something capable, efficient, and (hopefully) affordable.

    .

    TangoAlpha said:

    One advantage of Substance Painter is that the subscription model is in fact hire purchase. So when you've subscribed for long enough, you can convert it to fully owned.

    That is a good way to pay for Substance Painter.  ZBrush might be a budget buster.

     

     

    Thank each of you for your replies.  

     

    Post edited by Diomede on
  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,388
    edited March 2018
    McGyver said:

    I bought 3D coat because it can turn a triangulated mesh into quads, and I can auto map and paint a model... Plus you can model in it... (But not as well as with Zbrush).

    But if you don't care to model and if you can map really well in other programs, or want to paint over models with existing maps, then those features of 3D Coat are mostly unimportant and Substance Painter is probably better.

    This was an old model I made in Sculptris (I think) and painted quickly in 3D Coat

     

    That is a really cool creature.  I am a huge fan of creating really cool creatures.  I will look at 3DCoat. as well.

     

    Post edited by Diomede on
  • Silent WinterSilent Winter Posts: 3,876

    Substance (suite, including painter and designer and the image-to-map thing, I forget the name) has a 30-day free trial - so you could check it out and see if it fits your workflow.

    That's what I'm planning to do, eventually.

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