I think handpainted has much less of a place in PBR. I'd go so far as to say conventional 'handpainted' is pretty much the antithesis of what PBR is trying to achieve. But if a developer wanted to drop PBR/next-gen lighting/post-processing, and just go with handpainted, I'm sure nothing is stopping them.
^ 100% i was gonna say "how is hand sculpting any different from hand painting" and then i saw your post. also regarding PBR, i have done several projects with 80% hand painting while using PBR. it is just a rendering idea. as long as you dont put too much lighting information into your albedo then all your hand painted…
Look at the darkness 2 and the wolf among us. They don't use normal maps in the traditional sense, but use it in the diffuse shading with a ramp shader to get really stylized lighting effects. As far as pbr/PBL goes you can still go stylised the tech dosnt limit you at all, in fact it can help you a lot of stylzation will…
It really depends on how you look at it, if you want to confine it to the really narrow box that is "hand painted", eg, every texture in the game is painted by hand with static lighting, then no, it doesn't really make sense to do that with current/next gen technology. On the other hand, if you're mearly refering to…