3D - gemcutter handpaint texture WIP (Patreon)

here's progress on my latest model! i nearly fully painted this model yesterday. it's my first honest swing at the 'handpainted'  texture method and i'm having a lot of fun :> just gonna shape up a few details and clean up a few weird spots

i did the bakes for the textures that helped set me up to handpaint in blender, painted a bit in blender using the help of the bpainter addon (gives you easy-to-use layers with blending modes which helps loads when you just want to jump in without worrying about nodes). then i decided to try out 3Dcoat, so i grabbed a trial and went to town figuring out how that thing works. i like it!

blender and 3Dcoat are both great for my needs. if i decide to continue doing my models in a detailed handpainted style i might consider buying a license for 3Dcoat. it's responsive and easy enough to use, and the ability to easily sync your entire paint layer stack with clip studio paint (or whatever PSD compatible software you have)to touch up the layers is really neat

my main gripe with blender's texture painting is how the brush operates (or..doesn't operate) along the curvature of your object. in 3Dcoat, the cursor circle is projected along the normals of your paint object more organically and the paint follows that, but in blender the cursor stays flat and the paint projection is not across the curves of your object but more shot directly from your point of view. here's an example of what i mean with 3DC on the left and blender on the right: 

it's only an issue when painting narrow parts of your model or on an edge that overlaps with another, but it can get frustrating to work on an arm/finger/ear/whatever and realize later you got paint on the wrong part of your model and have to clean up after yourself. especially bites when you have to clean up a part you've finished painting/detailing and have to repaint it!

gripes aside though blender feels great for painting especially with bpainter. if blender fixes view projection issue/provides an along-normals projection option it'll be even better! it's already fixed for sculpting and usable there with the new vertex painting, so i'm hopeful for that to be adopted by texture painting. until then i may stick to doing more 'casual' painting tasks in blender