Hi, I'm trying to make weapons for some old game engine. These game engine only use one diffuse map for textures, so I assume substance painter isn't a good idea. Here's some example of what I'm trying to learn:
Dont use Photoshoph. Its to much work to get all the PBR channels right. Just use Substance Painter or Quixel Mixer.
Edit:: I have spoken to fast. But still use a 3D painter to project images onto your asset and clean it in 3D. Even if you use only the Diffuse. Go with Substance.
It's not any special technique you need to use. You'll still want to use Substance. It will output whatever type of images you need.
Just basic painting skills is all that really makes it stand out. You can save a lot of time by making good use of substances many grunge filters, and using different baked maps like curvature, AO, etc. They don't substitute for artistic eye and attention to detail, but they save grunt work of pushing a brush around in many cases.
The only diff between doing in photoshop versus substance is ergonomics. In PS you'll be working without immediate realtime feedback. That slows things down significantly.
Whatever you can do in SPainter is possible within Photoshop too considering it's a Photoshop with group clipping (i.e. cs6 and up) . But many things is more convenient in SPainter for sure.
You need a custom script in Photoshop to output layer comps into packed tgas for example. And you often have to record an action to repeat what you manually paint in color channel into heigh or roughness one .
Still few tools like colors tweaks , patch tool etc are immensely more convenient in Photoshop
Replies
Just use Substance Painter or Quixel Mixer.
Edit::
I have spoken to fast. But still use a 3D painter to project images onto your asset and clean it in 3D. Even if you use only the Diffuse. Go with Substance.
Photoshop would be fine for this. We used to have a bunch of tutorials for this kind of stuff. Painting gradients to look like metals, etc.
https://www.pinterest.es/pin/369647081896416449/
https://medium.com/@oesterkilde/https-medium-com-oesterkilde-racer445s-sword-texturing-tutorial-ab9913d4893a
https://www.google.com/search?q=metal+texture+tutorial&tbm=isch