For most professional game and VFX workflows today, it's heavily weighted toward procedural texturing with manual refinement, not either extreme.
A typical workflow looks something like this:
-
Start with physically accurate base materials
- Smart materials
- Tiled scans
- Material libraries
- Measured values for roughness/albedo/metalness
-
Use baked mesh maps
- Ambient occlusion
- Curvature
- World space normals
- Thickness
- Position
- ID maps
-
Build wear procedurally
- Edge wear
- Dirt accumulation
- Dust
- Rust
- Water streaks
- Oil
- Paint chipping
-
Hand-paint where the procedural approach breaks down
- Hero scratches
- Storytelling damage
- Unique stains
- Decals
- Custom masks
- Local color variation
-
Finish with subtle breakup
- Micro roughness variation
- Fingerprints
- Slight color shifts
- Surface noise
- Directional wear
What has changed over the last decade?
Years ago (roughly 2012–2016), artists often hand-painted much more:
- Grunge masks
- Dirt
- Scratches
- Wear
- Edge highlights
Modern versions of Substance 3D Painter make much of that procedural. Artists spend more time:
- Building reusable layer stacks
- Creating masks
- Adjusting generators
- Mixing materials
- Directing the look
Instead of manually painting every scratch, they paint the mask that controls where scratches are allowed, then tweak the procedural effect.
Where hand painting is still essential
Manual work is still important for:
- Characters (skin variation, makeup, scars)
- Stylized games
- Hero props seen up close
- Storytelling elements
- Specific art direction
- Breaking up the "Substance look"
Many experienced artists say that the biggest giveaway of an inexperienced Substance user is relying too heavily on the default smart materials. Everything ends up with identical edge wear, dirt placement, and scratch patterns. Strong texture artists customize generators extensively and introduce intentional, hand-authored variation.
Typical time breakdown
A rough estimate for a realistic hard-surface asset might be:
- 60–80% procedural layers, generators, and masks
- 20–40% manual painting and cleanup
For hero assets, the manual portion often increases significantly because the close-up scrutiny demands unique detail and art direction.
Current best practice
The prevailing mindset is:
Automate the repetitive work. Hand-author the important work.
Procedural tools excel at creating believable, physically consistent surface behavior. Manual painting is used to add uniqueness, narrative, and visual intent—elements that algorithms can't reliably infer. The strongest PBR textures usually combine both approaches rather than relying exclusively on one.
