What are all the methods to texture game ready assets (methods studios actually use)?
polycounter lvl 2
There are three ways I know of, to texture a model for a game, are there any other ways?
Method 1: Using layers, materials, smart materials (Example: realistic games)
Method 2: Hand painting textures (league)
Method 3: Using polypaint, mainly in zbrush but blender can also do it (just not as good) (Example: No idea)
Replies
And everything in between those 3
Also a lot of resuing of textures with atlasses/trimsheets
You could also look into decal workflows
These wiki pages might help you
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/ChannelPacking
The putting multiple maps into one RGBA map is so big brain, how common practice is it thou?
It's just bits.. You can even have something like (4 equal-sized channels) RGBA = 8bit + 8bit + 8bit + 8bit = 32 bit = 6bit + 6bit + 6bit + 5bit + 4bit + 4bit + 1bit (7 non-equal-sized channels). There is another example in:
It's pretty common tactic to combine grayscale textures together, saves memory.
Most common use is 3-channel packing for Ambient Occlusion (red), Roughness (green), and Metalness (blue).
It's extremely rare to pack more than four channels into a single bitmap, since there are no tools optimized for it, and I doubt there are compression formats for it.
RGB vs RGBA, the Alpha channel usually increases the memory size to a degree that makes it prohibitive to use. Some compression formats cause the size to double if alpha is added.
Examples from games I worked on.