I'm really confused with the best workflow for my project. I'm using 3ds Max with Arnold Renderer. The scene has 20 or so objects, all are UV'd, some I need to be multiple materials others only one. If I need an item to be both gold metal, and coloured glass, how do I get an Arnold standard surface to control both parts,…
Others have gone over the details but I'd just do all my texturing in substance designer. With designer you can just output the materials setup for different renderers. There's an arnold and unity output preset. And it exports directly to sketchfab.
I would also highly recommend researching the web stores where you want to sell. Carefully read their tech specs, plot out what their requirements are. Compare them all against each other, find the common denominator and prepare to that. Arnold is not the commonality I'll wager. Pbr most likely is.
There's no hard rule here, it all depends. You can use 1 material for multiple different surface types, but it's usually more work to do this as you have to separate the surface types in every texture... Metalness, Roughness, Albedo, etc. This is often required for realtime export since we typically want less complex…
This is where I'm unsure where to proceed. The model is being made in 3ds Max 2019, with Arnold Renderer ideally, and I was going to try shader tree pbr kinda materials. I *think* (read: unsure) I see a youtube video where you can later bake complicated materials/shaders down into basic pbr maps, I was planning to do that…