Workflow of UV's

>>528486
There is no one method to doing anything. It depends on the artist and their preferences as well as the needs of the project.

Generally, if you have a lot of displacement though it's advisable that you make sure that renders properly. From there it can branch off in several ways. For instance, if it's a very stylized non photorealistic character then you'll obviously just have to paint a diffuse texture with built in lighting (and perhaps you will incorporate baked ambient occlusion). If it is meant to have lighting, but you're using an older shading model, then your spec/gloss maps will be following the old method (where you tighten up the gloss where spec is stronger and vice versa). And if you want reflections you'll have to create separate reflectance maps. On the other hand, if you're working with many modern shading models, specular/reflectance is merged into one attribute, which usually stays constant for one material, and highlights are instead controlled with roughness aka gloss, which automatically will dim/brighten highlights based on how rough you make the surface. Or it could be the metal/roughness workflow, in which case you don't need a specular map and you simply define which areas are metal or dielectric (this assigns a constant reflectance to dielectrics if the metallic is 0 and converts your color map to the specular if the metallic is 1). If none of what I said makes sense, you should do some reading on PBR, as you have no business painting maps if you don't understand what they're really doing.

I mainly work aiming for realism, and this is my personal workflow, generally: I make sure displacements work, adjust the scale as desired. I create/import a lookdev lighting setup (a neutral setup that lets you see the model clearly, this could be 3 point lighting, quality HDRI map). Now it depends what kind of model it is, but generally I won't start really doing lookdev yet.

>>528488
cont.

However, I'll throw shaders and set up basic values so I can get a good sense of things and the maps I need. Because often you'll want way more than just color spec bump and roughness, maybe you're layering a dirt shader on top and want a special map for that if that makes sense. Some people prefer to do more work within the texture painting stage and some within the shading stage. Again... it depends on preferences and needs.

Once I know what I need, I'll start with the bump map usually. Reason being that surface details like this can often be reused in the other maps as a base. It also makes it easier to tweak it in lookdev when there aren't any other maps getting in the way of your judgement. From there, I'll do the color map, making sure not to paint in too much shadows (that's the renderer's job). If you use a software like Substance Painter there's a lot you can get for free procedurally, but even then you'll want to tweak it and do handpainting so it doesn't look like you just slapped it on. Once the color map is done, following general realism guidelines (not too black or too blown out, not too saturated), I'll create a roughness map usually from scratch. Reason being that I find color maps don't always translate great to roughness, and you lose a lot of depth/detail if your roughness map is a clone of the color. You want the reflectance of the surface to feel independent from the color. At various points I'll export my maps out to keep testing them in the lookdev scene (especially if you're only using photoshop). A good understanding of shading will help as you can do a lot outside of texturing to bolster the look of the object, like layering on procedural noise/patterns to vary the color and value of surfaces.

>528488

Wow thanks for those info man.. Really appreciate it