When comparing MagicaVoxel vs 3D-Coat, the Slant community recommends MagicaVoxel for most people. In the question“What are the best voxel editors?” MagicaVoxel is ranked 1st while 3D-Coat is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose MagicaVoxel is:
Has an isometric view mode for people who are doing isometric drawings.
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Pros
Pro Has isometric view mode
Has an isometric view mode for people who are doing isometric drawings.
Pro Free
No cost, subscription, or license, even for commercial use.
Pro Excellent rendering mode
Raytracing, GI, AO, and configurable PBR, all GPU accelerated.
Pro Very easy to use
MagicaVoxel has sane defaults and an intuitive interface. You add or remove voxels with the left-click and rotate the camera with the right-click. The interface does not overwhelm or get in the way, yet it keeps all functionality within easy reach.
Very helpful for beginners is the fact that hovering with the mouse over a tool shows hints on how to use the tool. The hints can be found at the bottom of the interface.
Pro Realtime render
The viewport renders the objects in real time. Changes made to lighting and materials (such as reflectivity, opacity, etc) are instantly shown on the screen with minimal to no delay. The renderer also allows adjusting things like FOV.
Pro Actively developed
MagicaVoxel is constantly being developed with new releases bringing bug fixes and new features being released on a constant basis.
Pro Great workflow
Bake possibility, easy to create a custom palette. Not even in version 1.0 and it's already great.
Pro Keyboard shortcut cheat sheet is available
A list of all keyboard shortcuts organized by category is available on the website.
Pro Imports and exports as .obj
Pro Large build size
Now supports up to 2048^3 voxels.
Pro Object Trees
Now has a “world” and “object” mode, objects can be grouped together and organized, multiple layers to organize, hide, and reveal, and objects can be copied as a “reference” so any changes to one will affect the others.
Pro Shader language to generate voxels
Pro A known app for retopology
3D coat is also known in the game industry to be a great app to preform retopology.
Pro Link to Photoshop, or any app that can open PSD files
You can save and open your texture work in apps like Photoshop, work on them and send them directly back to 3D coat. It will remember your layers and update.
Pro Professionals recommend 3D Coat for Handpainted textures
You can texture in many styles with this app, but when it comes to Handpainting, as seen in World of Warcraft and Torchlight, 3D Coat is the one that many professionals will advice you to as their top choice.
Pro PBR materials
3D Coat supports the creation of your own PBR materials that are ready to be used in the PBR workflow.
Pro Voxel sculpting
Voxel sculpting is entirely free from the bounds of polygons and topology.
Pro A fast and fun way to UV
3D coat has made UVing my work go super fast and it's actually quite fun because you're finished in a breeze.
Cons
Con No native Linux
It works in Linux, but Wine should be used.
Con Small sizes
The maximum dimensions for one voxel is 126 x 126 x 126 (since May 2020 it is 256 x 256 x 256). To put this into perspective, the kvx format (an older format by ken silverman used in games like blood, shadow warrior, and ZDooM-based ports) has maximum dimensions of 256x256x255. while newer versions of magicavoxel include a world editor (in which multiple voxels can be arranged into a set), each voxel is exported separately.
Con No support/help
There is no clear way to get help, though you might be able to reach out to the dev via Twitter, also github should be easy to manage.
Con No command line options
Without command line options, it's not possible to automate rendering at all. If you have hundreds of models (to make an animation for example), you have to render all of them manually. Plus, you cannot even open .vox file by doubleclicking it!
Con Bad model mesh exporting
For video game development, it's needed to rearrange some of the vertices, builds triangles per color, instead of one big mesh. It's tedious to solve but gives overall nice results.
Con Hard to change camera
The camera options don't have 2d view. Plus, the pers camera option is too hard to use when creating rooms.
Con Does not support intelligent palette merging when importing a model as a brush
Con Not a voxel program
This is a paid texture program. Why is it in this list?
Con Voxel sculpting hits your system
Voxel is quite heavy on your computer, if you intent to use this as your main model and sculpt app do enough research to see if your computer can handle it and if you have the right graphic card for it. If you really have doubts , just go ask in the forums.
Con 7 layer restriction in the affordable version
The cheapest version available only lets you paint on 7 layers, which is very unfortunate.