Modelling is the part people learn first, and then everything they make looks like grey clay. Texturing is the rest of the job, and it has a reputation for being fiddly mostly because the steps are usually taught out of order.
The order matters: unwrap, bake, then paint. Do it backwards and you’ll redo the painting.
1. UV unwrapping: flattening the model
A texture is a flat image. Your model is not flat. UV unwrapping is the process of cutting the surface and laying it out flat, like the pattern pieces for a shirt, so that each point on the model corresponds to a point on the image.
- Seams are where you cut. Put them where they’d be hidden on a real object: inside edges, under the arm, along a panel line, at the back.
- Avoid stretching. Most software shows a checker pattern to reveal it; squares should stay roughly square everywhere.
- Keep texel density consistent. That’s how many pixels of texture cover a given amount of surface. If the head is at twice the density of the body, the head will look twice as sharp, and that inconsistency reads as wrong even when viewers can’t say why.
- Auto-unwrap is fine for a first attempt on a simple prop. It gets worse the more the shape matters.
2. The PBR maps
Physically based rendering means the material describes real optical properties, so the same asset looks correct in any lighting. Four maps do most of the work:
- Base colour (albedo): the colour of the surface with no lighting information. This is the map people get wrong first — don’t paint shadows or highlights into it. The renderer adds those. Painted-in shadows fight the real ones and make the object look flat and dirty.
- Roughness: how sharp or blurry reflections are. Low is polished; high is matte. This map does more work than any other in making a material read as specific. Nothing in the real world has uniform roughness — fingerprints, wear, dust and moisture all vary it, and that variation is what makes a surface look real.
- Metallic: essentially a yes/no. A surface is metal or it isn’t. Values in between are for transitions like flaking paint over steel, not for “a bit shiny.”
- Normal: fakes surface detail by perturbing how light bounces, giving you scratches, weave and pores without extra geometry.
3. Baking
Baking transfers detail from a high-polygon sculpt onto a low-polygon model’s texture maps. The heavy sculpt stays in the studio; the light model with a normal map ships.
Baking also produces maps you’ll use for painting: ambient occlusion (where crevices are), curvature (where edges are), and thickness. Those drive smart materials — the reason dirt automatically collects in recesses and wear appears on exposed edges. Bake before painting, because the painting depends on them.
4. Painting
Work in layers, like Photoshop, but on the model. A practical order:
- A base material across the whole object
- Variation within it — subtle colour and roughness noise, because uniform surfaces look synthetic
- Edge wear driven by the curvature map
- Dirt and grime driven by ambient occlusion
- Story-specific detail: a scratch where something was dragged, a stain where something spilled
Every real object has a history. Texturing is mostly deciding what happened to this one.
5. Tools
Substance 3D Painter is the industry standard and the shortest path to good results, on subscription. Blender can do the whole pipeline free, including unwrapping, baking and texture painting, with more manual setup. ArmorPaint, which we’ve covered, is an open-source painter in the Substance mould. Quixel and Poly Haven provide free scanned materials worth studying even if you don’t use them.
6. A first project
Texture one simple prop with a real-world referent: a metal thermos, a wooden crate, a plastic radio. Find three photos of the actual object first. Unwrap it, bake AO and curvature, then build the material in the layer order above.
Constrain yourself to one material story — “this was cheap, kept outdoors, and is ten years old” — and make every decision serve it. That produces a better asset than any amount of technique applied without a reason.