Hand Painted Assets

This doc goes over how to create assets using Hand Painted textures.

Hand painted assets are assets that rely more on an art style for the texture, rather than a direct texture approach. Some will use a single diffuse texture and fake the metallic and roughness look, whereas some may decide to add metallic, roughness and even normal maps to enhance the result.

The benefit of Hand painted materials is that they can look amazing, the disadvantage of hand painted textures is that each asset requires its own material, which greatly increases the draw call cost of the overall experience.

By using custom textures for important assets, and mixing in trim sheet approaches for less important assets however, you should be able to create a good compromise between custom materials and optimised use.

How you paint your texture depends on the resources you have. You can paint directly on your asset in Blender, or use something lie Substance Painter or Marmoset Toolbag. The other option is export the UVs from Blender and paint on them within photoshop, although you would need to save to apply the result regularly to see if it's working.