obiwandk
so 3d coat is a good program to run whit houdini for organic stuff and texturing and sculpt

Yeab and the price is right; around $300. That's about 1/3 the price of Zbrush or Mudbox

And it doesn't just sculpt a skin or a topology like Mudbox or Zbrush. It sculpts voxels.

I like it because;

1. It was the first to adopt PTEX, only a month after Disney/Pixar announced it.
2. Best retopo/UV tools in the business, whether you want to retopo by hand or automatically. Auto Retopo is state of the art, based on 2010 Sygraph papers
3. Voxels instead of SubD skin. More like clay. Voxels is what everyone else uses for smoke and fluid effects. 3D coat turns them into a plastic sculpting medium. Very nice. When you've finished sculpting in voxels then you give them a polygon/subD polygon topology or skin using those retopo tools which you administer a UV map or port out to PTEX
4. Good paint tools, particularly the Per Pixel Paint, and the PTEX paint tools. You can paint displacement for bump, normal maps or displacement maps, specularity and color/diffuse simultaneously or in any mix of those elements you choose. But of course Mari by Weta/Foundry is the premier paint tool now.
5. I like it's layers system better than the one in Mudbox and Zbrush for some reason…
6. Andrew Shgapin the creator is a very advanced thinker and you can bet if some new powerful tool comes to hand he's going to rapidly adopt it, the way he did with PTEX.

Having said that, the 3dCoat/Houdini PTEX workflow is a thorny path and I haven't conquered it yet thanks to the fact that there such a severe lack of documentation and tutorials for it.

Do you hear that Side Efficts? THERE'S A LACK OF PTEX TUTORIALS FOR HOUDINI.

so a possible work flow is the get the basic shape in Houdini and detail and texture it in 3dc