At the beginning of the project, it was unknown if Substance Designer alone would be enough. We planned for a hand-painting finishing stage to get assets completed and signed off.

During development, the material quality was pushed much further than we thought possible. We were delighted to find that the quality of the Jaegers straight from Substance was so good that little to no touch-ups were needed to finalize the assets. This saved us lots of time allowing our artists to focus on other assets and briefs.

We used Clarisse to bake out data maps like AO, curvature etc., so we could leverage our render farm and version tracking software. The data maps closely matched textures generated by Substance products in case we wanted to bake with Substance Painter or Substance Designer.

The Substance materials were built upon the same common set of data maps and hand-painted maps, allowing us to design a standard set of interchangeable features. Simple hand-painted maps were made in Mari (Substance Painter didn't support UDIMs at the time) and included masks for decals, panel lines, and substructures. We altered these maps in Substance Designer to create features like decal wear and panel warping.