Anyone tried procreate’s 3d texture painting?

podperson

podperson

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As someone who cannot justify paying for Substance and refuses to pay a subscription for Photoshop, I was pleased to discover Procreate has added multichannel 3d texture painting as a feature. One thing that may be a bit annoying for C3D users is it relies on Pixar’s 3D file format (you can use OBJ as well but then you can’t round-trip).

Very promising so far.
 
I do not use procreate myself, but my wife does. She somewhat was underwhelmed from the 3d painting abilities (which may have it's cause in the simple fact that she uses an older ipad pro. It's probably a whole other experience with an m1 ipad pro). Do not get me wrong, procreate is an excellent, outstanding app for digital painting. Sooner or later that function will be on the same level. But as yet you can't produce a full pbr material (no normal map for example) and it misses a whole other bunch of possibilities. And as I said, my wife didn't have a good experience with it.

Photoshops 3d tools will vanish. Adobe officially announced that already a while ago.

Substance painter is somewhat the absolute gold standard for 3d painting. Nothing else compares in quality except Mari. That one exists as a free version strictly for non-commercial use. 4k textures are the maximum you can export and there are some other restrictions. Also, there isn't a mac version anymore. Still thought, I'd mention it.

And while I'm mentioning free resources only available for pc. It's not a painter app, but Materialize (http://www.boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/) can create textures for example just from a diffuse map. As said before, it's only for Windows, but something like that might be a good companion to procreates limited texture generating abilities, if you choose to give procreate a try.

You might want to look into Armor paint (https://armorpaint.org) which is available for Mac as well as Windows and Linux. Meanwhile a mobile version for ipados and one for android are available, too (both with somewhat mixed reviews). It's theoretically free, but only if you compile it yourself. The compiled version does cost 18 € (probably the same in $, but I do not know). It's intended as some substance-painter-clone, far from being on the same level yet (and missing the possibilities of designer and sampler, of course).

Quixel mixer is also free. And my experience with that was frustrating. It's in my personal experience still far from being usable, although not everbody may encounter the same problems as I did. The most annoying was invisible layer controls, but a lot of others as well. It was bad on Mac, it was bad on windows. The painting in itself is far from being a good experience, there are only a few brushes (you can create them yourself, but not just import abr) and to me seemed limited on different levels. The main purpose seems to me to sell quixel stuff. You get some 600 materials for free, which sounds astonishing, but a lot of them are just color variants of another.

But well, if you're into digital painting you can't go wrong with procreate anyhow. But you also might want to give armor paint a try.
 
Phungus said:
IMO It is hard to find anything cheaper than Textura's rent to own for 19 euros x 6months
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It's somewhat of a strange argument if everything mentioned before actually is cheaper ;)

Before this deteriorates into a totally useless discussion: In this case, "cannot justify paying" in all probability just means that he wouldn't use it very often, maybe just a few times in a year. It wouldn't be a problem to just buy the full version (which is the better offer), but "not justify" probably includes the time to learn the app properly. It's a good program for sure, as is the full version with the sculpting abilities (and what-not) on top. It's certainly not wrong to include it in this list.


As an aside: For what you get, Substance is also rather cheap, because you actually do get a lot for 20 bucks a month, a very good, thought through app that virtually has no limits in texture creation and painting.
 
Procreate‘s 3D features are immature. I hope they add proper multichannel painting and then provide support for presets. Substance is the gold standard for pure painting, and of course 3Dcoat and ZBrush are combined sculpt/paint tools.

i too have a first gen iPad Pro, but I’m painting very simple meshes so far.

if I were making serious money off this I’d just get Substance / 3DCoat but I’m not so free is awesome.
 
podperson said:
Procreate‘s 3D features are immature. I hope they add proper multichannel painting and then provide support for presets. Substance is the gold standard for pure painting, and of course 3Dcoat and ZBrush are combined sculpt/paint tools.

i too have a first gen iPad Pro, but I’m painting very simple meshes so far.

if I were making serious money off this I’d just get Substance / 3DCoat but I’m not so free is awesome.
Click to expand...

Like I said, you might want to look into armor paint if you want something that's more mature.

Zbrush is a great app in many ways, but for texture painting it isn't that great in my view and it's not comparable to textura, where you can literally paint with materials. (Also zbrush is notoriously hard to get into, and even while I own it for 18 years, I never could really dig it's UI and some parts of the workflow. It's somewhat counterintuitive for me on many levels. Also, since it got bought by maxon the days of free updates are over. It's to be expected that it will be subscription only at a steep price (and the new version of C4d now shows zremesher. That makes me see it as a (rather dim) possibility that zbrush as we know it even might vanish long term. Something I didn't even think about before). The good thing is of course that you can create very accurate displacement maps or normal maps from high definition sculpts to less defined bases).

In your case, neither would I get substance, but I have to admit, it changed a lot for me, as you do not have to recreate a material by painting it stroke by stroke. There are many functions, generators, predefined materials and whatnot that help you to do it fast. You can create a material in designer or sampler and just paint with that, be that with a brush, on the level of selected polygons or by parts of the mesh (and triplanar mapping is just awesome). I was very, very reluctant (adobe just bought it when I considered it) but in hindsight I waited just too long.

I do hope that sooner or later procreate will support pbr materials and a way to paint with those as they are as well as creating them painting map by map. That will take a lot of time, though. It probably depends on how many users actually want to use these possibilities, but it could be a great companion to nomad.
 
Armor Paint (on the iPad) has literally no reviews better than 3 stars. It looks like it has a lot of potential if it gets fixed. I agree with everything else—zbrush’s UI is awful.
 
That armor paint is a mixed bag on ipad and android, I already mentioned. The pc and mac version are even used by some on a professional level (I wouldn't, though). I don't know how the development will go on, but there are plans to create something in the vein of substance designer as plugin. Besides Quixel Mixer it's the only thing that's halfway comparable with Substance Painter (and Quixel may be great if you buy their models. Mixer itself is horrible, but it has also potential).

For mobile I hope that procreate's texturing will be developed further. It could be a really great companion to Nomad (which definitely could profit from more painting abilities. Again, it's rather my wife who uses those two apps. My own experience is limited (but Nomad is awesome, no question about that). For mobile I'll keep an eye on Armor paint.
 
podperson said:
As someone who cannot justify paying for Substance and refuses to pay a subscription for Photoshop, I was pleased to discover Procreate has added multichannel 3d texture painting as a feature. One thing that may be a bit annoying for C3D users is it relies on Pixar’s 3D file format (you can use OBJ as well but then you can’t round-trip).

Very promising so far.
Click to expand...
Procreate 3d paint is a good start, I used it on a fairly old iPad so speed was the issue, soon testing with new m1 upgrade hopefully. I purchased substance designer from steam recently, but cheetah nodes are quite good to rework over with results
 
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