This stage is the most fun one for me, as you can take something that looks quite blobby and make it shine.

Texturing

A big part of why I chose to do this certain concept was that I liked all the different materials present in it. I am a big fan of cloth, leather, and metal combines with each other. First, I try to get a good base in the high poly – if I can not feel what the material is from the bakes I need to go back to the high poly and work on it a bit more. However, I do not want to overdo the high poly either. I sculpted the high poly to a stage where no micro details were present. This means that I had tertiary details like memory folds and other material characteristics whereas details like stitches and fabric patterns were added later in Substance Painter to the flexibility of a package like SP intact. Substance Painter is a very powerful tool that lets you iterate crazy fast – you can change things like pattern density and strength, the color of the material and amount of dirt and such with the drag of a slider. For this reason, it is very important not to add too many micro and tertiary details in your sculpt.

When I am texturing, I always start with fill layers where I get my base values down. The roughness in conjunction with the base color is great to block in early. From there, I added subtle variations with different noises which I start to layer one by one to break up the albedo and roughness. In these layers, I also paint on top of the noises to break up the tiling of the procedural noise. On top of these layers, I add micro details like fabric patterns, stitches, seam lines and other tertiary details that are needed. Even though it is not physically correct, after that, I like to add a slight AO on top of the base color and the roughness channel to give it slightly more contrast and further variation. These are the steps I take for every material (except for the skin which is a longer process). From there, it is all about adding dirt and blood and tweaking the material in my renderer of choice.