Questions about texturing objects

I’m currently learning UV mapping, and as a result, also trying to learn to texture. I’ve pretty much just started on UV mapping, but from what I can see is that after you finish UV mapping an object, there are many if not hundreds of small artifacts that require a texture to be placed on them. If I want to apply a specific texture to each small piece, how do I go about it? Am I supposed to take each texture I want to apply, and then shrink, warp and translate it to the artifact that I want to texture, using apps such as Photoshop? That seems incredibly slow and horrible, but is there something I’m missing?

I know Mudbox has direct-painting, and that Z-Brush has Poly Painting, which isn’t entirely useful unless your model is high poly, but I don’t know what other method I would use in order to fully texture a UV-mapped object. Assuming I already have the textures that I want to apply, what are my options, and moreover best options. Is everyone using Mudbox for texturing or manually placing the textures on the artifacts?

Texturing is probably one of the trickiest and most important parts of making an asset. There’s a dozen different ways to approach texturing, and half a dozen different applications with different approaches I can name off the top of my head. A few notable ones, DDO, Substance Designer, and Substance painter are all very PBR texturing friendly, and all have a different workflow. What is your goal for the model? do you want it to be realistic or stylized? Are you going to be using similar textures on multiple objects? Is this a modular asset? What’s the target platform?

Thanks for the reply. Well in short, for my current project I’m going for realism. Right now I’m just creating my first set of assets to furnish a single room. I do plan to model with modularity in mind. As I’m just starting out, I can’t necessarily say I have a target platform. My goal (for instance, on my current asset) is simply to make a kitchen cabinet. It particularly wouldn’t be hard to texture seeing as all the UVs are mainly just planes. But when I see texture maps for things such as characters, their UV maps appear to have their texture perfectly aligned with the map (which seems impossible if I was just manually placing “square” textures and shaping it to the UV artifact). I want to expand my knowledge so I can understand why people choose what approach (and program) for each type of object.

I didn’t even know about Substance Designer or Painter before this, so thanks for that. And since I don’t know anything about those programs, what and how are they used for exactly? The last time I researched things like this, I basically stopped at “Mudbox is great for painting directly on the mesh,” so unfortunately I don’t know much about other methods and may seem a bit outdated. Funny enough, I have modeling knowledge; but with other fields, I barely even know how to research it to learn.

Seeing as my “goal” or scope is rather small right now, is there any material you can recommend to getting started?

Well typically you bake textures from your highpoly model to your low poly model, which is going to give you base textures that you build from to create your final textures. Even artist working on handpainted assets without a high poly model will often bake lighting and ambient occlusion.

For modular and environment pieces, you can get away with sharing tiling textures, textures that can tile without obvious seams. Substance designer is great for making tiling textures, but there’s a lot more you can do with it. Also modular assets sometimes use smartly arranged textures that can be reused and repurposed Texture atlas - polycount You can also blend together multiple tiling textures, this is often used for terrain MultiTexture - polycount

Zbrush, 3dcoat, Mudbox, and Substance painter all pretty much allow you to paint directly on a mesh. Substance designer is a bit more video game friendly with it’s PBR implementation, so you should get similar results with their viewport and UE4

I see! I’ve got a lot of info from this to research. Sadly it makes me seem like I’ve been living under a rock with my initial questions. Embarrassment aside, this is exactly the kind of info I was looking for! It’s always fun when the rock you’ve run into is suddenly lifted and you are able to go a step further. Thanks again.