Looking to invest in 3D painting software, affordable software. Blacksmith uses an outdated form of cloning where in I'm looking for textured projection painting like Sculptris offers.

I wrote to 3D Coat about a week ago and no response so it's a bit of a red flag and decided to pry around elsewhere.

Blender's paint features are far too difficult to use properly.

So Sculptris pretty much does what I want but I'm afraid that any imported models in to Sculptris are going to become poly heavy which is the case if you're importing for sculpting. 

What I'm wondering is that, if  I skip the sculpting section and take the model directly to paint, will Sculptris still raise the meshes poly count?

I believe Sculptris only works with tris. (You know... "sculpt-tris"?)

So unless your mesh is starting out as a triangulated one, you may have a doubling or so of polycount.

If you have a mesh made of tris, you should be able to skip to paint w/o having more polys added. (You can also modify a mesh without adding polys to some extent by having the detail slider set to 0 as well.)

 Thanks for the info. =)

Quote -
So unless your mesh is starting out as a triangulated one, you may have a doubling or so of polycount.

Actually this is wrong. You will get more faces, but tri-count stays the same, no matter if your mesh is quad or tri. Every mesh is made out of triangles, just most apps hide them because quads are easier to work with, but quads are still made out of 2 triangles. Thus converting mesh will not change anything

Tell that to the UV mapping.

It's pretty obvious that the UV layout will change if you change from quads to tris. What he meant is that the poly count still stays the same. However, if you've already layed out the UV's (and even if you haven't) then the shells won't change shape (or shouldn't at least) just the look of them. Thus further enforcing the point that nothing really changes.

It's true that quads are pairs of tris and handled that way at some level. But in a lot of software, what happens when you split quads into tris, it still doubles the effective (as opposed to actual) polycount. It can also do things to vertex and edge order on an .obj, so any morphs and things of that nature end up broken, and that means starting all over from square one.