Here are some hard-surface material that I painted today in Corel Painter. I’m very happy with the crackled bark.

Painter has great brushes, especially I love the Sargent brush, and various mixers and smudges. On the down side, the software crashes a lot more than Photoshop. It is also more limited in masking. The neat circle around the material is a mask, and in Photoshop it’s possible to group all layers and mask them. This seems to be not possible in Painter, or I haven’t figured out yet how to do it. The workaround is to copy my circle mask to all layers, a bit tedious but it works.

Next I need to make some studies of water and other transparent and translucent things. These will be harder because they don’t follow the standard light & shadow model of solid objects like rock and wood.

And here’s a 3D material for an ancient wall, which I made in Substance Designer. This is procedurally generated from a bunch of nodes.

The maps that Substance outputs can be imported directly to UE4, Unity or Arnold. It’s interesting that there are two rendering models – one which uses Roughness & Metalness (Unreal), and another that uses Specularity & Glossiness (Unity). It seems to be that Roughness & Metalness is the new way preferred by most engines.