Depends on the technical restraints of the game and on the art direction. If assets need to fit a specific specialized style, and need to have very few draw calls, then baking them into unique sheets might make the most sense. Another example using modular design and layered shaders together to excellent effect:…
It becomes an issue when it impacts performance. A good workflow is to kitbash your game level using similarly constructed (but visually ugly and unrefined) blockouts, then profile the game to find bottlenecks. Once the blockouts are all ironed out, then you refine the art to make it pretty. To Frick has some nice tips in…
Hi there! thanks for commenting this piece. actually I made this one during polycounts bi monthly challenge, they gave me a lot of feedback there and I'm forever grateful. The admin made this post because the banner/site header needs to be in a single post I guess. here's the link to the challenge…
regarding the xgen scalp. i found it to be better to just use masks/ids for this and do the actual hair color roughness and normals in substance painter or photoshop using those masks. the baked down xgen always looked kinda shit. but the same hair baked down with random normal values softly blended into the texture looked…