[Tabletop Gaming] Battle Board Ho, 3D Coat Off the Starboard Bow!

Did he just call me a ho?

As I may have mentioned during the end of the last debacle, I was going to get, install, and work with 3D Coat to see if it in the Trial Mode will let us do what we need to texture this thing.

Just looking at that interface, you could be forgiven for being a little intimidated. Or a lot intimidated. Or a considerable amount of intimidation occurring, because I am a long time, old-school hand at working with bizarre software – and this thing scares the shit out of me. I think I'd almost rather be working with a pirated copy of Cinema 4D, which at least I know how to use (from a previous life).

But okay. We've made the decision and now we shall stick with it.

Though I expect that this particular post will be a lot less organized and a lot more confused than my usual. Maybe that's what people want. I will definitely be taking far more breaks to look stuff up and figure out what to do with myself.

Just looking at this opening set of options, I'm not exactly sure what I should be wanting to do. I don't really want to UV map mesh. I don't need to sculpt. I don't want to paint with PTEX. I don't really need to re-topologize.

Even after going through a lot of the basic training stuff on YouTube last night, this is going to be a bit of a mess. I think we'll start with the UV map, even if it's just to see if we have one on the object. Or just give us an opportunity to pull it in and see what we have.

Importing?

Let's just share the weird journey I'm going on along the way.

This looks very promising!

Straightforward!

I'm going to go into Onshape again in order to export brand-new, very clean, very high-res object files one more time – just to be sure that nothing along yesterday's weird exploration blew up.

Also because earlier I imported the model into 3D Coat in a different way and it didn't come in with the separate top pieces, so either I screwed something up or I was looking at it upside down. Either of these things as possible.

That looks promising!

Obviously the model imported and it has various color channels, which bodes well. In fact, we see all of the materials that got exported from the original system – even though they aren't really labeled with colors. We can still see that they exist as textures on the system, and maybe we can get them to be replaced by other textures that we don't have to built from scratch.

Yes, it's up on end and we may have to do something about that eventually – but for the moment, it's a step forward!

Texturing?

So it's in the system. It can be read. It can be manipulated. We have hooks to structure it.

Maybe I should watch the next video in the series to figure out what to tinker with next?

This guy makes really bite sized bits of instruction, but that's surprisingly useful for what I'm doing right now, with you.

So looking at the interface, we can definitely get rid of our Layer 1 and bake in some lighting. That should turn out pretty well. I'm also going to grab one of the HDR environments because I remember how to do that from watching a video last night.

It's just a matter of reaching up to a weird little icon on the bar, clicking it, and picking something that will provide a little bit of lighting from every direction.

Baking on the ambient occlusion and the curvature map along with the direct lighting map, things are starting to look pretty good. This is definitely our object, the hallway. We have the edges properly highlighted and the gaps between very clearly delineated by ambient occlusion, and overall this looks like a good start to being able to paint our model.

Of course, now I have to find out how to get the textures on the selected areas. Maybe I need to look at the VoxTree to see if it actually knows the separate objects are separate objects.

I'll just have to tinker.

That one – not quite so useful. The one important piece of information, how to use "F" to set your orbit point is pretty damn near essential given the way that 3D Coat has you controlling the interface.

I would prefer if it was a lot more like Homeworld, or Onshape, but it is what it is.

Not a lot of information there on how to properly deal with applying textures, but it's nice to know that I can paint with a base coat and move forward on that basis. Interesting.

(I can already see how it is that 3D Coat gets you on the purchase plan. Sure, the basic 3D Coat app is only $99 – but you only get to use three layers at any given time for operations. That's clearly silly. Any fool can see that you're going to want a separate layer for at least the things we talked about and probably for increasing levels of paint detail – and so you'll need the $399 version to really do any kind of work. Cunning. But at that price point, you might as well go ahead and buy Substance Painter and Substance Designer for the same amount.)

Again, sadly, not so useful for us. Cute, but not useful.

I think we're going to have to go elsewhere to find a tutorial on working with already extant textures ("textures") and maybe even using smart textures along with them.

That ended up being a lot more interesting and useful than I thought it was going to be. I still don't quite know how I'm going to select the individual objects in the model for specific textures, but I feel like this can be turned into a really nice piece of art once I figure out how to get the basic textures on to it.

And that's a pretty interesting feeling, considering that I don't think of myself as an artist in any real or significant way.

I can see now that one of the problems that were going to have is that there is no differentiate double bottom between the top plate which was concrete in my original design and of the supporting bit which could be anything but I had as metal flake paint.

That might be because the models go right up to one another and I chose not to weld vertices which overlap on the import, so we may have two separate modular sections there. It may simply not be visible in this particular view.

But it is something I noticed.

Time to poke at some things.

I noticed that over in the UV editor, each of the key object portions have their own UV island defined. You can see the entire packed thing down in the right, but that's not important. The important thing to note is that in the upper right-hand corner you can see each of them have their own definition – and I have started manually going in and setting a sensible name for those islands.

I suspect there is some way to use them as filters for where you want to apply an individual texture. I just need to figure out the intersection between those things.

The middle slice across each tile is a little strange, but I'm certain that occurs because of the curved fillet at each corner. Describing that intermediate space is going to be weird for a UV deconstruction in any case.

Now back to the tedious job of changing these things by hand.

Interesting, and useful! But not what I was looking for.

What I'm looking for is "Paint Groups," which our model already has set – but they don't quite match what we want or need. However, if we can manipulate the already defined texture space into setting paint groups, that'll be perfect. Because once the paint groups are set, we can directly put smart textures on those groups without a problem.

Now that we know what the problem is, we can Google directly for it.

Progress!

No thanks to any Google search, more thanks to just poking around in the Paint system and discovering that the Fill tool actually lets you select Surface Materials as a target. When you use the surface material as a target, it fills that entire surface with the Smart Material that you've selected!

That means that all the tedious little name changing that I did in order to update in the UV pane actually lead directly to being able to select each of those in the Paint pane and give it a proper coat.

Fantastic!

Now – to try and figure out if we can export this back out to a proper OBJ with proper texture images.

Exporting?

Definite progress has been made! We have textures! We have unwrapped UV maps! We have all sorts of things!

I was going to try to touch up some places manually with a little extra painting, smear some dirt around, see if I couldn't get something a little more personal – but it wanted to be a little resistant.

I decided to stop while I was ahead, go to the export under file, and put this out as a PBR (metalness) set up, because I know most things can work with PBR these days.

So – moment of truth.

And for some reason that was a complete failure – but it led to a discovery.

On jumping back into 3D Coat, I discovered that – for whatever reason – it hadn't actually saved anything past some of the very early tinkering around. All the textures were lost. This actually turned out to my advantage, because re-creating it may have been tedious but once learned, it was easily done.

And you'll note that in the application itself now, I have some disgusting mud/blood splattered around by hand. Which should give it a little bit more of that authentic, "I found it in the dungeon" style.

Now let's make another run at an export. There are about 3 billion export options and none of them are well documented.

https://sketchfab.com/models/400696aadb7b402198fd734ad639fae0

We call this painful and ridiculous failure.

On repeated attempt to import the model to TS, I received a simple, straightforward, "I can't import this OBJ" error. No actual useful information, no pointers as to why it failed, no actual explanation – just failure.

I'm the kind of guy who looks at a problem and tries to figure out ways to get around it. In this case, I really needed a way to determine whether the model and the textures were good for anything at all, and the easiest, radiused tool for doing so?

Sketchfab.

So I did the simplest possible test. I simply hit Upload, dragged over the files just as they had been exported from 3D Coat, hit the go button and leaned back.

Mere seconds later – it happily chirped that the upload was done, the model was in place, and it looked fantastic.

And it does look fantastic.

There's nothing wrong with this model.

Epilogue

Not to put too fine a point on it – but I'm quite annoyed.

When you do everything right and still fail… That's a part of life. You get used to it. If you go out and try things, a number of them will fail, and you only learn by failure. It's all true. It's absolutely true.

But we can at least hope for better. Unfortunately, that's not what we got today.

We do have a fantastic model, however, and I am totally going to complete texturing the room-sized version just for my own pleasure and for the opportunity to practice with the tool.

And then I'm going to send it up to Sketchfab so that everyone can enjoy it as it's designed, and then I'm going to take some top-down shots just like I did with the 3D vehicles to turn them into tokens. I'll do the same thing with these to turn them into tiles.

It's not what I wanted, it's not what I planned – but it's something that will work.

• Onshape
• 3D Coat
• Two Hour Dungeon Crawl
• Substance Painter and Substance Designer
• Sketchfab
• Tabletop Simulator