Friday, May 29th, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

Pilgway releases 3D-Coat 4.5

Originally posted on 5 January. Scroll down for details of the commercial release.

Pilgway has released a beta version of 3D-Coat 4.5, adding support for physically based shading in the viewport of the voxel sculpting, retopology and 3D painting software.

The release makes 3D-Coat the latest games-related tool to implement PBR, following its introduction in Substance Designer and Marmoset Toolbag.

Preview your models with physically accurate materials
3D-Coat implements a metalness, as opposed to specular, PBR workflow. (The Marmoset website has an excellent blog post explaining the difference between the two.)

There seems to be the usual range of options for creating materials and assigning environment maps.

Updated 29 May: 3D-Coat 4.5 is now shipping for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

As well as physically based shading, the update introduces a lot of other new features, including HDR support for panoramic images as backgrounds in the Paint Room.

In addition, 3D-Coat now supports Photoshop-compatible layer groups, a new ‘AntiBump’ smoothing method for surfaces with high-frequency detail, and symmetry is now supported across every tool in the application.

Users can paint seamlessly across multiple UV meshes; and seams are now displayed in the Paint Room.

There are also a number of updates to the existing paint and sculpting tools, including presets for importing normal maps from other software, and a new Scale tool for retopology.

The update is free to registered users of 3D-Coat 4.x. Pilgway is currently running a range of discounts for new commercial licences of the software, starting at $334 for a node-locked licence of the Windows edition.

Read a full list of new features in 3D-Coat 4.5
(Includes download links)