These textures were started by creating the albedo first. I took my bakes (curvature, cavity, AO) and created a kind of base, black and white texture. Technically, this meant putting lighting information into the albedo, but for the stylized textures, I don’t mind that so much (as long as there is no obvious directional lighting). AO in the albedo can often read as dirt/grime which was a good fit for this environment.

I then overlayed some photo textures that I got from Textures.com By applying a few filters you can get rid of some of the noisiness in the photos. After that, a gradient map was applied to bring some initial colors. After that, I added some local colors like browns, grays, blues, and yellows. When going from dark to light, I like to shift colors (for example, brown to gray to yellow). More snippets of photos were added here and there to add some grime/dirt, or just some color and value variation. The curvature maps were used to add some of the typical edge highlighting, and an AO mask helped to add a dust and dirt pass. The roughness was created after by adding a black and white layer on top of my albedo layers and then tweaking them (lightening/inverting/etc.). For the roughness, I tried to add lots of variation. It’s always interesting to emphasize elements from your albedo in the roughness map. Some of the objects use some metalness as well. I never used 100% metalness to let the albedo shine through, this is something I learned from Worth Dayley.

The challenge with these textures for me was keeping them consistent, as well as keeping the “level of detail” consistent. What I mean by this is when sculpting two different textures, you don’t want one to be overly detailed, with a ton of small details, and the other to have less and bigger details. Maintaining the same scale for the details is essential. What I usually did was a test bake for around 10 minutes into sculpting. That way I could see if I needed to adjust my course. Another way to remedy this would be to sculpt things with more context by importing some assets into ZBrush, just for the scale comparison.