I am fairly new to cg and Vue 6 is the only application I have used so far. But I was a traditional illustrator and have been using Photoshop for about 13 years, that's how I make my living. I have actually worked with about 10 different projects that have required cg and in the past I have just used freelancers. Now I have decided that I would like to try and start doing some of my own cg work. One of the last projects I did was to create a mountain that was in the general shape of a molar tooth, then I put some snow on the mountain that help define the actual shape of the roots. I did this in Vue 6 Infinite using a terrain that I then sculpted into the shape I needed using the brush tools in the terrain editor. It was a real pain in the a** because all you can really do it to make something rise or dip. So I was wanting better sculpting tools. The other issue I had was with the texture. I had to place this created mountain into a actual photo of some other mountains. In this photo there where some mountains in the foreground and then some mountains in the background. So I had to try and create a texture that was close to what was already in the scene, it was similar to the look of Half Dome in Yosemite.  I had tried using some high res photo's of some real texture that was close to what I needed, but the size of the texture map was only about .25 of the actual size of my mountain. I played around with all of the different mapping modes and while I was able to get something that was interesting, I was not able to get exactly what I wanted. I wanted to be able to first create a texture in PS that would be the same size as my mountain so that I would be able to know where, say a certain crack would be mapped.
So it sounds like 3D coat may do what I need. I guess my question would be, is there anything that z-brush or any other 3d apps can do that 3D coat can not? A final question, and this may be showing my newbie stripes, but can you also set up lights and render from this program? All of my work is for print and usually combined with photography, so I need some that will let me create very photorealistic images. And one more thing, I am on a mac and it looks like right now z brush is not even an option for me.

Thanks,
Steve
Steve