When it comes to diffuse textures I usually start off with having the materials the asset requires set up in Substance Designer which I then apply to the mesh through a material ID map and Multi-Material Blend node. I then use baked maps to power nodes for scratches, triplanar mapping, edge wear/highlighting and dirt/rust build up. I used this same process when doing the Gladiator’s Armory project as a way of getting a quick first pass on the diffuse texture.

With the helmet I used the Triplanar node to project a Cloud noise node to the mesh and then used curvature maps fed into Slope Blur nodes to add edge highlights. I used ambient occlusion maps with some noise fed into a Histogram Scan node to highlight areas for blending in some rusty orange tones. I used the G channel from the Position map to get the Z gradient which I subtly overlaid onto the whole diffuse at the end…Admittedly my Substance graph is pretty messy as I wanted to add the edge highlights and multiplies from the AO for the different surface types separately. It meant stuff like the metal would have harsher edge highlights that the curtains etc. I probably could of set this up more

Efficiently but at the time I didn’t think anyone would see it ?