There are so many materials already made, that I wonder if material artist is still even a job or is it just part of environment artist's duty. And if it is a job, what do they actually do? Even more rocks, wood and rusty metal?
I still see material/texture job art postings. Now granted numerically the number of open material/texture art jobs are probably on the lower end compared to other 3d art jobs but they are still there and hey if its of any comfort at least there are many more material/texture artist job openings than there are game writer…
Indeed - the material artist has to understand how to build models, how to handle UVs, have a decent grasp of what can reasonably be done in a shader and have a decent grasp of memory management.
The thing about scanned assets is that they set a very high standard for fidelity that every hand-authored material has to meet. Eighty percent of environment textures might come from scans, but the remaining twenty percent are a whole lot of work.