Character Texturing workflow (Question)

PleaseHelpMe

When texturing a character is it better to bring the entire character with clothing and all the parts into substance painter together and simply have the different materials split into different udims, or should I be making different materials for the different pieces (example: skin, boots, eyes)

Eric Chadwick

For games, it totally depends on how the character is being used... the type of game, type of hardware (pc or console or mobile or VR), etc.

Often artists will split a character into body vs head. With a third material for transparent parts (hair, eyelashes, etc.)

Clothes would be in the body material, unless the character has multiple clothing options.

If you're doing a portfolio piece, not for an actual game production, then don't worry too much about specs. Just make it look awesome. Optimization techniques will come later, after you've got the visual quality bar.

GarethStandfield

How i personally do it, so i can see how the colours all work together under the same lighting conditions, it also helps that i make them all have 4k maps then scale them down in Photoshop after if its not neccecery helps me AA abit i feel, or it might be plasebo who knows ahha.

*Ignore my uvs... im terrible at them *

poopipe

Why scale stuff after in Photoshop? Just export at a lower resolution 

Neox

poopipe said:

Why scale stuff after in Photoshop? Just export at a lower resolution 

scaling in substance painter is far worse than doin it in post.

for one, if you do pre export all the masks also get scaled and previously set up materials now might have gaps, depending on the setup.

but even on export overall it's just pretty steppy and looks like bad compression, even using mipmaps in unreal does look a ton better than scaling stuff with substance painter,

PleaseHelpMe

Eric Chadwick said:

For games, it totally depends on how the character is being used... the type of game, type of hardware (pc or console or mobile or VR), etc.

Often artists will split a character into body vs head. With a third material for transparent parts (hair, eyelashes, etc.)

Clothes would be in the body material, unless the character has multiple clothing options.

If you're doing a portfolio piece, not for an actual game production, then don't worry too much about specs. Just make it look awesome. Optimization techniques will come later, after you've got the visual quality bar.

Thank you so much! I think I will settle in on having the skin as one material so I can tweak subsurface, separate material for the eye parts, and then having the clothing just separated based on material to save me from intense amounts of substance files.