Looking for artist(s) advice on approaching an anime themed art style

Xzrr77

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.

poopipe

Designer is good if either of these things are true

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

Xzrr77

poopipe said:

Designer is good if either of these things are true

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

Thank you so much for your thoughts. I'll be honest I'm kind of new to designer, probably only have like almost a year of experience with it. I have made some materials with it like a stylized roof material for the modular house i'm working on. The thing is I want to try and save as much time possible. I think I will take your approach to combined both zbrush and designer to make the shapes I need because as you stated it does take time and a lot of nodes to just adjust one shape. The person directing the project told me they wanted a more simplistic design so maybe heavy normal details are better controlled in designer. 

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.

pior

"The thing is I want to try and save as much time possible"

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).