TWahl

I had a few textures made specifically for pipes so I decided to start brushing up on edge modeling by making a midpoly from them: I'll bend this into a cylinder and make a texture in substance, then make further pieces for bends, etc. I decided to start with this since it was simple and did not require too much work.

Depends on the export preset you are using and whether or not you created your own. Theres quite a lot of variance in flexibility especially when you take into account the game engine you are exporting to. I went and found the below links on the Polycount Forums/wiki. They mainly pertain to UE4 but are probably helpful. The first one has some info on Substance Painter/Marmoset channel options as well, which might pertain to your question. https://polycount.com/discussion/181922/understanding-texture-channels-between-substance-painter-and-marmoset https://polycount.com/discussion/187786/channel-packing-for-ue4 http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/ChannelPacking UE4 Export presets from SP for reference: Substance shader API: https://substance3d.adobe.com/documentation/spdoc/shader-api-89686018.html

You can do it in any program really and it isn't too hard (I believe). Certain texturing softwares like Substance Painter also allow you to export your texture maps pre-packed too. You can use it any map you want to reference really, but I think there is a preference for certain color channels due to their compression. I think the green channel offers the best compression so it is often used for roughness maps in PBR, since it would provide the most clarity.

I've been making a lot of progress on the trim textures so far, so I might take a slight detour and try to make some modular assets in the near future. This is something that wil need to be done in time for putting the promotional materials together. I haven't done any poly modeling in 3ds Max in quite a long time, so I am a little rusty. But I am confident that it should come back to me very quickly. Looking to create "mid poly" assets that are more aligned with polygon budgets in current generation AAA titles like Resident Evil 2 (very good game). One good thing is that I should be able to utilize the CAD geometry that I previously created for the high polies of the textures in this process. I will remove fillets and very fine details until I am left with the shapes that will most clearly define the sillouhette (major panels, cables etc) then export to FBX and unwrap. Stuff like small rivets and bolts will be left alone. Should really take things to the next level. Painting height map details has also been my friend, so I can spend less time modeling small detail elements and/or "floaters". I have quite a huge reference folder to give me inspiration, so I will begin to start by taking a look and making some preliminary sketches.

You can pack the maps into different channels of an image to save texture memory. I believe that this is common in asset workflows for games engines like Unity, Unreal etc. Saves VRAM and makes your graphics card work less hard for better FPS. One 32 bit RGBA texture will take less memory to store than 2 to 4 bespoke 8/16 bit grayscale texture maps. I would not know how to set up a shader to accomodate that though. Shader coding is not my strong suit. *Edited