Like Utopius said you can get used to it, and I have, but still it's vexatious when you're learning the interface and trying to learn say human and animal anatomy at the same time. So the end result was a needlessly complex interface with a lot of extra clicking and a requisite awareness of whys and wherefores of it all. The whole 2.5D thing seemed to encourage the pictorial horror vacui of Meat's Meier's style, or psychological mindset. Of course you could just CTRL N to ditch the Pixol transformed sculpt then drop a fresh version of your sculpt sitting in the stack, BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY? It also meant that there were 3 distinct ways to save your work in Zbrush ZTL, ZDOC and ZPR (Z tool, Z Document, and Z Project) I knew all about this and even I would get enraged at say inadvertantly turning my sculpt into a 2.5D Pixol object that was fixed in space and not being able to immediately Ctrl Z my way back out of it. The problem was that the 2.5D pixol stuff made the interface needlessly complex and annoying for those that didn't understand all the extra stuff you had to do because of it. It simply never caught on and over the years, well now decades the 3D sculpting tools rapidly grew in power but the 2.5D Pixol stuff just faded into the background. What ended up transpiring was that everyone piled in for the 3D sculpting tools and ignored the 2.5D stuff. I may be wrong but my impression was that the development team was deeply influenced by their resident artist, Meats Meier. This had the potential at the time of being very powerful as you could assemble scenes that were huge with great complexity even though the angle of view was now fixed. The idea was that you sculpted stuff in 3D then went into 2.5D mode and composited your now fixed objects into a 2D plane that still allowed for changes in lighting and illumination. This was based around the idea of PIXOLS. Instead of directly trying to be a simple 3D digital sculpting program it started out as this weird hybrid a 3D/2.5D program that at the time boasted of being the next evolution into a kind of 2.5D Photoshop. The problem with Zbrush is that it started out in an odd manner. ZBrush is an industry standard, so I assumed that its user experience could be better.

So I think about to give it another chance.īut. So I waited months because the new announced version (now 2021) should contain many many improvments. Sometimes I tried to dive into 3DCoat but it happend everytime that I struggle with its UI and 'how the things to be done'. If you end up looking at buying 3DCoat let me know, currently selling much cheaper than here on the website. In the end I'm taking the Substance route for myself - I don't need the other capabilities offered by 3DCoat and don't typically hand paint my models, so I'm actually selling my 3DCoat license. tools that you wouldn't get with Substance. You get a lot of great modeling, sculpting, retopo, etc. I know you mentioned you are only looking at the painting/UV features, but obviously 3DCoat is the better value proposition. 3DCoat has similar features, but it's going to be a destructive workflow, where Substance is much more non-destructive (maybe someone can share a better workflow for this in 3DCoat). You can apply a layer and then adjust it's mask through sliders for instance. It also does dynamic masking better than 3DCoat. Go search Gumroad or Artstation for 'Substance' or '3DCoat' and you'll see what I mean. are much easier to find for Substance than for 3DCoat. For one, it's a much more popular tool, so tutorials, materials, brushes, masks, etc. However, Substance has a lot of things going for it as well. 3DCoat also has vastly superior UV capabilities - I think currently Substance Painter is only doing Auto-unwrapping which works for some cases but isn't near as flexible as the tools you get from 3DCoat. You have a lot of control over your brushes and the smart materials are really good (though the default library is lacking). It works much more like Photoshop and isn't as confusing in my opinion to just apply some paint. I think for hand-painting your textures, 3DCoat is still the better tool.

3d coat alternative