Micro vertex painting on the other hand is a custom texturing mode unique to 3D-Coat and its older versions. Per pixel painting is the “traditional” industry standard 3D paint mode, where you can import a UV mapped model and paint on it.

Two painting modes exist: per pixel painting and micro vertex painting. The Paint room seems to contain a few exotic implementations at first glance. Lighting can be adjusted in a similar manner to the Voxels room, and a few different rendering modes are available (flat color, wireframe, low smooth mode). There are also other ways to select colors, all of these tools are functional and work well. The B key brings up a standard color picker with HSB and RGB controls. Pressing the spacebar gives you a neat pop-up menu where you can select all standard tools and predefined paint colors. Object parts can be hidden or locked by material, these part definitions can be imported in standard. You can import objects with multiple UV sets and create textures for each of them. Painting tools are relatively powerful, if you consider 3D-Coat is a sculpting application. On a positive note, edge selection and element / UV island selection is quick and responsive. This is not a problem if you use some common sense when working with more complex models. UV tools are pretty good for unwrapping low polygon models, but with more complex models the real-time nature of the tools starts to work against itself, since it may lead to very sluggish screen updates and UI response. Three different unwrapping methods are available, ABF++, LSCM and planar. However, they are good enough to create proper unique, non-stretching UV mapping for an object. 3D-Coat offers quite usable unwrapping tools though currently they’re not a replacement for major modeling and animation software’s unwrapping tools.

3D-Coat UV mapping in action, UV mapping clusters and seams marked for unwrap

3d coat texture painting