Greetings, I'm trying to wrap my head around what would be the best way to approach environmental assets that would fit a fantasy anime setting. I mostly create stylized art pieces that fit the WoW style or Heroes of the storm. However I'm making a modular house kit for a personal project and I'm wondering if it would be best to sculpt everything or to just make all the details/textures in substance designer and painter. Everything in the images below seems to have a clear shape for all the pieces but the details aren't too crazy like something in heroes of the storm for example.
From the image examples below:
Do you think it would be better to just use substance designer to make all the textures/details or sculpt every piece in zbrush?
Thank you.
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Replies
1: you want a managed and consistent material pipeline that will allow for extensive re-use of assets, interoperability with painter etc.
2: you can make really good things with designer
Nothing stops you from using sculpts as part of your designer workflow, it's actually usually a good idea when you have anything specific to make since dicking around with shape blending takes ages and generally looks a bit shit. you can always apply procedural variation / coloring on top of your sculpts later on.
Personally I'd use a Designer/Painter workflow for almost all of the things I see there but that's because a large part of my job is to develop material authoring pipelines around Designer/Painter - I wouldn't necessarily advise the same approach for everyone
The only problem I have is I want to make an atlas for some of the parts to save on space but if I make a material in designer it won't tile unless the parts take up the whole uv space. I'm just not sure how I will get them to tile for each part on the atlas. I may need to adjust the cursor area in painter or just maybe make everything in designer and make the atlas there. The roof will be a separate material/texture set though.
Then you have two choices : you either use a complex, high end workflow (Substance Designer, Painter, and so on ; and sculpting if needed) in order to create a small number of master textures and materials that can then be leveraged to build *all* your assets, using clever UV tricks (see the Sunset Overdrive setup). This means that asset authoring will only consist of modeling and UVs, without any baking.
Or, you establish a pipeline around standalone unique assets, but using as few tools as possible (bypassing SD/SP/Zbrush altogether), allowing you to create all your texture details with just selections converted to normalmaps, directly in photoshop (which would be extremely fast).