Next Gen Art Pipeline (ZBrush/3DsMax/Substance/UE4)

Pipeline should be as follows.

Substance Approach

1. Sculpt high-poly

2. Export high-poly to 3d package of choice (3DS Max, Maya, Blender, etcetera)

3. Retopologize a low-poly over your high-poly sculpt

4. UV Map/Unwrap the low-poly sculpt

5. Export the high-poly from your 3D package of choice to FBX (or .obj but I like .fbx better)

6. Export the low-poly from your 3D package of choice to FBX (or .obj but I like .fbx better again)

7. Import both high-poly and low-poly into Substance Designer or xNormal

8. Bake the following maps

a. Normal

b. ambient occlusion

c. color_id

***Note: Bakes are typically more successful if it is exploded and a cage is used (cage should match your low-poly vertices 100% with a slight "push" applied)

9. Alter color_id map in photoshop or GIMP to align specific UV islands to materials (not texture, think about what the material make-up of that piece is. Is it chrome? silver? wool? polyester? grease? etcetera) -- same material should get same color (e.g. all light chrome is red, all dark chrome is dark red, all wood is blue, etcetera)

10. Re-import new color_id map into Substance Designer

11. Import low-poly into substance designer/painter (if you used xNormal to bake maps)

12. Import Normal and Ambient occlusion maps into Designer/Painter (again, if you used xNormal to bake maps)

13. Begin creating materials using either Substance Designer/Painter. You may use the color_id map that you edited previously to stop bleeding while painting/creating your tiling materials.

14. When you are finished with your materials, you can reveal specific attributes to be altered IN-ENGINE (eg. dirt, rust, water, etcetera)

15. IF YOU CANNOT OPEN THE SUBSTANCE PACKAGE IN YOUR ENGINE OF CHOICE (Unity has plug-in support, Unreal Engine 4 requires a different branch of the engine you can download at Allegorithmic's site) -- then you will need to right-click each individual output material and export, then import into your engine along with your low-poly and apply all the maps to your low-poly asset.

16. IF YOU CAN OPEN SUBSTANCE PACKAGE IN YOUR ENGINE OF CHOICE - import your low-poly asset and your substance package, apply that package to your asset. Enjoy the fact that those attributes you revealed earlier are easily changed IN-ENGINE if you want to make changes.

17. Take a high quality screenshot/video in-engine.

VOILA! You are done!

Important Things To Consider

Materials =/= Textures

PBR (Physically Based Rendering) may or MAY NOT be required for you engine of choice. PAY ATTENTION! You can change this attribute easily in Substance Designer/Painter (and should) before you even begin you work inside of substance designer/painter (Before you even bake maps!). Although you can change outputs after the fact, it is much easier to just simply do it correctly from the start.

IF USING PBR -- READ READ READ! THEN READ SOME MORE! THINK A LOT! AND READ SOME MORE!

IF USING PBR -- You're diffuse will be the color of the object with no (little) depth information in it. Your normal map and roughness maps cover this.

IF USING PBR -- Pay attention to if your output maps in Substance Designer/Painter are set to linear scale or not, and whether the output is what your engine needs. Set this to your engine needs (sRBG or Linear).

READ THIS

AND THIS

THIS IS GOOD

HAVE I MENTIONED READING YET?

ALLEGORITHMIC'S INFORMATION

THEY SO SMART

As I wrote this up very quickly because DoubleF is on a deadline, this is subject to changes and alterations. Enjoy!

Since PBR is the future and so is .DDS formats (or well, still up-to-date) you should check out this DDS breakdown by Ben Mathis

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/dds_types.html

Yes I know about the link name but really it's a serious one!

Edit:
We talked about this in the chat and the whole .DDS compression vs Normalmaps came up. So I figured I'd post it here too.