Depending on the task I sometimes use 3D Coat for UV’ing and Texturing. What I like about 3D Coat is it’s “Hand-Painting” features. It’s feels very natural and very Photoshop like in that regard. Then there is Substance Painter which is also ever evolving and I am using it quite frequently as well! Love the fact that you can create Smart-Materials which you can then later re-use or even share with others. Lastly, I am of course using Adobe Photoshop for certain tasks. As you can tell, I am jumping between software a bit. I am OK with that. I feel at home in all of them.

Lighting

That’s difficult to answer really as every scene/object requires a bit of different setup. Sometimes the client has a specific look in his head which can be tricky to achieve especially in realtime. You also have to take into account if the camera or your viewing angle changes. Light interacts with objects in different ways. Surface texture all have different reflective or refractive values. In other words, it does help to read up on lighting and how light interacts. Scientific papers on Global Illumination, and such, are interesting and useful.

Sci Fi Table

by Thomas Pasieka

on Sketchfab

My game engine of choice is Unity. I use it 95% if the time, as do most of my clients. Having been a Unity user for the past 10 years (time flies when you’re having fun!) I have seen Unity evolve into one of the biggest game engines to day. A few years ago we had “Beast” at our disposal to bake light. It was really great back then and even allowed for baked and realtime light to be mixed. Now we have “Enlighten” which takes it all to the next step. Currently I am a big fan of the “Final Gather” feature in Unity 5.4 (beta) which takes a bit longer to render but the baked results are very smooth!

As for workflow, I start out with very low resolution settings. It makes little sense to user high resolution bakes from the beginning. That goes for realtime GI and/or baked lighting. I place lights where there is an actual light source in the scene. I often use geometry with emissive materials to light if I need a softer light. Lighting is a time consuming task but key is to really use small “preview” settings and slowly work your way up before going for high res bakes.