In order to efficiently texture Robo, I break him up based on material assignments, except for certain areas like the head and the chest battery pack, where I’d like to see materials in context. This way, each Substance Painter scene doesn’t have too many texture sets to manage, and the system doesn’t get bogged down. The number of texture sets ranges from 3 to 30 in 2k resolution.

For texturing hard-surface assets with weathering effects, I would highly recommend going through Substance Academy’s official tutorial here, which covers in detail the process and workflow tips on texturing aging surfaces in Substance Painter.

With a lookdev contact sheet lying around, or an idea of what material goes on which part of the character, I typically start with Smart Material presets that more or less resemble what I want each part of Robo’s surfaces to be in terms of the type of surface and color, and I start tweaking each PBR channel, gradually adding layers of weathering elements such as chipped paint, rust, dirt, grime, dust, and so on. The idea is to remain procedural for as long as I can and then get into texture manually at the end - and so I add those details procedurally with masks, staying in the procedural realm for as long as possible, until I have to get in and start hand-painting.

There are two main benefits to working this way. First, it’s faster to block in lots of weathering effects procedurally. Second, the procedural effect is added in non-destructively, meaning I can go back to tweak parameters later on. The hand-painting part at the end is the final touch to break up the procedural look and make the weathering effects more organic. Coming from using Mari for this type of work in the past, it’s very refreshing to work in Substance Painter’s real-time viewport.