PBR or Handpainted ?

Elliott

Hi there !

I would really like to improve my texturing skills at the moment, and I see a lot of these artists who worked on Wayfinders, with this really beautiful graphic style. I would like to be able to get closer to this result :

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Ev85PN

But I wonder what workflow they used (PBR or Handpainting ?) 
Does Game industry still use Handpainting, knowing PBR workflow is faster ? If this is handpainting, is it still possible de get a similar result with Substance painter using PBR workflow ?
Any tips or advices ? 

Thanks for your time.

Benjammin

It looks like hand-painted textures with PBR rendering - you can see all sorts of little highlights if you look closely, and the metal bits look PBR-metallic to me.
The artist listed substance painter as software they used, so yeah.

Eric Chadwick

Love that style! Makes me think of driftwood and how it’s been sculpted by water over time. Neat stuff!

For similar hand-sculpted workflow, see the Polycount Forum thread Texturing - Siege Of Orgrimmar - WOW.

More on our wiki here: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/EnvironmentSculpting

See also http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/OrbCrasher

poopipe

there's a misunderstanding here

what people call pbr texturing is a set of standards that your textures need to fit in order to not upset a physically based rendering solution

how you generate the textures is completely and totally irrelevant

Eric Chadwick

Yeah good point. People certainly can and do handpaint non-photoreal assets using PBR standards. 

Also, you can cheat PBR rules, just like you can paint normal maps if you want. Once you gain an understanding of the tech, you'll find it's bendable to achieve what you want. Like, alien half-metal skin, or whatever.  

Elliott

Thanks for your answers So, if you can do handpainting using a PBR workflow, that means you are painting the on the Albedo map, but you also generate  Normal map & AO/Rougness/Metallic maps ? 

Eric Chadwick

Yes, if they’re needed. Some surfaces will not need every texture type. 

See the WOW texture tutorial I linked, has some workflow ideas.

Matt Fagan

Elliott said:

But I wonder what workflow they used (PBR or Handpainting ?) 
Does Game industry still use Handpainting, knowing PBR workflow is faster ? If this is handpainting, is it still possible de get a similar result with Substance painter using PBR workflow ?
Any tips or advices ?

From a glance. I would say a lot of it would most likely be done via baking from the high-poly source that was hand stylized in sculpt.

Most of the texturing like this is done with solid fill layering and procedural masking, in combination with gradient diffuse textures. Which most of the color blending comes from (gradient fills).

Any unique break up in colors on the surfaces are likely additional fill-gradients that have hand painted masks for revealed areas of new color.

PBR is being utilized, but most heavily dependent on Diffuse & Normal channels as the sole focus of the art. Any other channel (roughness/metal or spec/gloss) is added as a last touch if needed for subtle "pop."

Personally speaking, I was introduced to this approach a while back when VALVe released a DOTA 2 art publication on their method for texturing their assets. These are examples used in Photoshop. (Before substance painter took a stance.) But still applicable to Painter if you desire, with less effort.

Elliott

Matt Fagan said:

Elliott said:

But I wonder what workflow they used (PBR or Handpainting ?) 
Does Game industry still use Handpainting, knowing PBR workflow is faster ? If this is handpainting, is it still possible de get a similar result with Substance painter using PBR workflow ?
Any tips or advices ?

From a glance. I would say a lot of it would most likely be done via baking from the high-poly source that was hand stylized in sculpt.

Most of the texturing like this is done with solid fill layering and procedural masking, in combination with gradient diffuse textures. Which most of the color blending comes from (gradient fills).

Any unique break up in colors on the surfaces are likely additional fill-gradients that have hand painted masks for revealed areas of new color.

PBR is being utilized, but most heavily dependent on Diffuse & Normal channels as the sole focus of the art. Any other channel (roughness/metal or spec/gloss) is added as a last touch if needed for subtle "pop."

Personally speaking, I was introduced to this approach a while back when VALVe released a DOTA 2 art publication on their method for texturing their assets. These are examples used in Photoshop. (Before substance painter took a stance.) But still applicable to Painter if you desire, with less effort.

Thank you for the answer ! This is very interesting