Best practices: Paint details on stylized game assets or add via normal map?

I’m still quite new to the Blender world, but now I want to create assets for my Unity project. I’ve looked at various tutorials and have now come across something that seems contradictory to me.

It is about the creation of assets with a stylized theme via which they can be seen in Overwatch 2, for example.

  • It sometimes seems common to create small details such as ornaments, patterns or scratches on a polygon-reduced model via normal map (this was baked from a highpoly model in which these features were sculped).

  • On the other hand, some assets only have a basecolor-texture on which said details are painted.

Since I’m not in the professional industry but have to teach myself something like that, I hope you can help me with this.
Here’s an example (even both by the same awesome author).

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn3ukorJv4vvDHfsQCACI3qVgdAMfP3-7

vs

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn3ukorJv4vvkmo-mNOsicGj097lsS5-s

Whatever is the fasted for the exeuting artist and pleases the supervisor… in professional areas best means fasted…

There is also the possibilty to paint directly the normal maps… depends on the amount of details… or a decision on style… See for example:

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