Hello Guys,
Since we all know that Photoshop is a great tool for painting and coloring a character or a 3d asset but during texturing process, there is a lot of back and forth in checking textures in your 3d programme, What if you could paint directly over your model and yet maintaining a quality freedom that photoshop provides.

Well 3d Coat makes it all possible, today we will be looking at some texturing in 3d coat . I am going to tell you how you can use 3d Coat texturing feature and enhance your texturing process and the best part is its compatible with photoshop.
Compatible means it can export all your texture with all the blending and color information saved in a psd file format from 3d coat to photoshop and vice-versa. I will explain more on this feature later in the process.

Lets just get started. First import any of your 3d model in 3d coat. For this example we will be looking at a water canteen from one of our game. which is a low poly model and I have already unwrapped it in MAYA. Model shown below in 3d coat.

As soon as you click import, 3d coat asks you several options to choose, as shown in the image below, you can click on the Paint directly over uv-ed model, As we will be covering some texturing here, rest of the options are for retopology, sculpting and tweaking your model, so you can ignore others for now. So now we have our 3d model of a water canteen imported inside 3d coat.

Now we need to bake a AO map (Ambient Occlusion), so that it can help us seeing details of the model in real time and later we can blend the map with textures to give it more realism. For calculating AO, go to textures, and then click on Calc Occlusion shown below.

Now you'll see a pop-up called occlusion parameters with customizable values of Light sources, Lighting render target, Light count and Post smoothing steps. Sphere source gives an uniform kind of lighting, you can choose any source according to your need. I am using a Sphere + hemisphere source here. with a light count of 170 and post-smoothing of value 1. so that i can get a smooth AO map.

Results may be different according to your poly count of the model, it might look little messy on very low poly objects. but you can always improve it later. (tip: you can bake AO and other maps from a high poly model and then easily use it on your low poly version. this will improve the look of your model).

Switch to flat shade by pressing 2 key, As Shown in the above image shadows and highlights are successfully baked on our model, you can change blending modes from layer tabs according to your scene requirement, In the example we have AO layer blended as multiply mode. Now Its time to paint a basic color on our Canteen model, Go to tool set in the left, and pick the bucket icon which will color your model with a click, make sure you have unchecked the use color tolerance in the tool options.

Now we are ready to paint textures on it, Just pick brush tool from the Toolset and start painting some details, like shiny highlights and dark areas on it, Use brush tool to add details on the Cap as well. For giving it an old metallic look we can add some scratches with the help of the brush tool. You can also export the layers to photoshop to customize your textures, Just go to Textures > Export > All layer colors. Shown below.

Save the file and now you can edit it in photoshop too, here you can adjust colors, brightness and contrast of the textures easily and then import or sync back in 3d coat. and here we have our textured model of an old water Canteen.

I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial and can apply these techniques in your future projects.