Mindset and working each channel at once ?

Peksio

Hello. I would like to ask you about your advice. Right now I am learning texturing in Substance Painter. I am watching various tutorials and in most of them I hear phrases like "Greatest thing in Substance Painter is that you can work on each channel at once". And the more I think about it the more it seems uncomfortable for me.

I wanted to ask If I am wrong or maybe just "past gen" about all of this and those smart materials? Because "ideal" workflow looks for me like this:

1. Work on albedo

2. Add damage to albedo

3. Add various dirt

4. Set roughness and metallic

5. Add damage to roughness and metallic

6. Details on height/normal map

7. Minor detail and tweaks.

Should I "force" somehow myself to work on all channels at once with for example some smart materials ?

Thanks

throttlekitty

1 through 4 (and 5 to a large extent) can be a single step, it just depends on what kinds of materials you're working on. You may have already seen in the tutorials, that layering regular or smart materials and simply painting masks or using smart masks is a very common technique, particularly for edge wear. Working this way, you can focus on the masking itself, and make changes to individual material parameters at any time without needing to go back and manage selections each time you want to do so. Then you have the ability to stack mask layers, so if there's certain damage patterns you want to force, you can paint those in mask at any time.

Or using a painterly workflow, you can set all your channel parameters on the brush, and just draw strokes into a paint layer. Say, some acrylic design painted over some porcelain and you don't need anything fancy going on, just a difference in the materials.

poopipe

Make a material 
Mask the material
Repeat.. 

Work in layers that reflect reality and it all works fine. 

You can paint more complicated things (skin colour etc.)  but it's not the best tool for the job and it will feel clunkier than photoshop. 

Aabel

You are not 'wrong' or 'past gen'. It does sound like Mari might fit your needs better. It is channel centric, so it is very easy to share data between channels and build relationships between the channels.

Alex_J

I hardly ever use smart materials. I more or less do what throttlekitty and poopipe have described. 

look at the reference, separate it mentally by whatever it's relevant qualities are. 
make layer groups and name them accordingly. 
add mask to the groups and start masking off each area accordingly
add fill layers within the groups and tweak till it's good. 

at the end there may be a compiling of it all, then do some finishing stuff on a paint layer on top of it all. There is no rigid rules. If it makes sense to just do a quick paint by hand, rather than set up a new mask for something simple, I do that. Important : be sure to take the time to name things very carefully, even if it's a quick n' dirty paint layer, so that the project is workable should you return to it later.