Hand Painted, low poly, hardsurface texturing advice

Cluly

Hey there!

I'm working on a small project for a mobile game and I want to use a hand painted look to a hardsurface model. However I'm having trouble tackling the workflow and I'd love some advice on UV layouts and the process I should best use here. Here's a paint over showing the type of effect I'd like to achieve (It's just rough, but it gives the effect.)

I only have Photoshop and Blender available to me, so advice around those would be great, any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm sure I'm just over complicating it in my head.

Yadoob

I'm not sure what your real problem is. Is this the worflow of teturing a model like that or the technics behind "hand-painting" ?
If you are comfortable with paint-over, you can edit a snapshot of the viewport in photoshop and apply it on the object as a texture. The tool, in Blender, is in the option panel of texture painting, in "Project Paint": i's called external editing (you have to assign the software you want to use in Preferences). Once you are finished wih the paint over in Ps, merge the layer (alpha works so you don't need to keep the snapshot) and save. In Blender just press apply and the paint over will be added to the current texture (be carefull it's rather blurry). Then you can use the texture painting tool to refine the details (in 3D or 2D) or paint it in Photoshop. I don't think that's a "pro" workflow but maybe is it more suitable for you.
If it's the global effect of lignthning you looking for, you can bake several maps (lighting, ao) with a white material and use it in photoshop in addition to your hand painted texture.

Cluly

Yeah I guess it's more a worflow question and how to tackle it. I had thought about just projection painting the model via the method you suggested, but I'm not sure if its a good practice (as you stated.) I'm going to try a hybrid method of painting directly on the texture in PS and projection in blender, to see how that turns out.

I've just never come across such an angular model to tackle with this painting technique. All the hand painted models I've looked at tend to be characters or round easy forms (WoW type weapons and such.)