Texturing pipeline for Quake 2 texturing news

Today i want to discuss some difficulties during texturing process over the Quake 2 retexture. I spent already so much time and tried different approaches for making new textures for Quake 2...

The first one was - high poly modeling sheets inside 3dsmax. Then baking it to quad plane and then texturing in Substance Painter. It actually worked but after some time i realized that this pipeline is too time consuming and not professional at all.

The second one - making heightmaps (it generates all main maps like normals, curvature and ao) inside Substance Designer which i should use from right from the start. It has flexibility and keeps stable results, easy to change, much faster for making tileable textures. When you learn how to work in the Designer (may be hard at the start) - you will gain so much after. I already have library with all possible shapes and forms which could be seen on original Quake 2 textures. By playing with it i can make new textures much faster.

After Quake 2 RTX release i realized that i should work with it primarily cause it has full PBR and ray traced lighting method.

Though even RTX build has PBR, differencies between Substance rendering and game engine still present. Even when you are happy with what you see in Painter - it not guarantee same visuals in the game.

That`s why i am trying to develop master materials - something like BASE material that will suit Quake 2 art style and make all other textures from this. It will help me a lot to make retexture much faster and whats more important - keep consistency overall.

The material is a smart material inside Substance. It has basic metal, grunge, rust, dust. It is still in development, but when i will be happy with end result - all progress will gain a lot of speed and all struggle will gone.

At this moment almost every single one texture throughout 3 first levels of Quake 2 is done. It means that first beta release is not too far. Of course, people who have not RTX cards will sadge... but i will convert all textures also for Quake 2 XP engine. (but this release will be not so soon).