To me, the success in the texture painting process lies in thinking of my character as a group of 300 props, where every single one deserves the same amount of attention.

Right after I import my models, I change the default Substance Painter HDRi (Environment) to the one I will use for rendering in Maya (bottom Fig 1). That way our Vray and Iray materials will match perfectly, as they are tuned under the same light conditions. Two birds with one stone: I used to make my look development and texture painting two separate processes. Now, thanks to Substance Painter, I can solve the look of my materials directly in my textures. This is very helpful when you need to share your work from program to program, switching between software such as Maya, Max or Modo. You’ll be using the same maps, in the same shader channels, as long as they share the same render outlet. Also, and very importantly, If you keep your models UDIM-consistent, you won’t have to render more than three shaders per character: hair, skin shader, and everything else. I’m using a six-map setup in this Devil Dog: diffuse, reflection, glossiness, IOR, normal and opacity.

To make a proper material, I like to think of it as an onion: you’ve got to peel through layers of stuff to get to the center. Now, think of the center as your base material - chrome, let’s say - and all the peeled layers are reflection breakers, such as use, scratches, dust, heavy dirt, and in some cases mud (see examples of layers tabs in Fig 2 to 6). One of the great things about Substance Painter is that it gives us masks to separate each of these overlapping layers, and blending modes like Photoshop’s, to make them react in an unlimited customized fashion.

I used to bake AO and normals in Maya or Toolbag, and tension in Max, in order to have the perfect template to paint over my textures. Now I have those and then some, with the complimentary passes created when baking maps inside SP (world space normal, ID, curvature, position and thickness).