Dress your character in its final colors and materials—metal should catch light, skin should read soft, cloth should stay matte. AI lays down the base coat, you hand-paint the story, and together you build a complete set of PBR maps. This is where the character earns its visual identity.
Picking up from Modules 05 + 06: you've got clean UVs and baked normal/AO/curvature/ID maps—now turn them into real materials.
Texturing isn't just "painting colors on." Modern games use PBR (physically based rendering): you define what material each surface is, and the engine lights it by the rules of physics. So what you're painting isn't one image—it's a set of maps, each describing color, whether it's metal, how rough it is, and where it glows.
Understand these five (the metallic/roughness workflow) and materials stop being a mystery:
Base Color — the raw surface color, no lighting baked in! Leave light to the engine
Metallic — is it metal or not, basically black or white
Roughness — rough (white) or smooth (black), the channel that tells the most story
Normal — from Module 06, surface bumps and detail
Emissive — the parts that glow on their own: eyes, runes, screens
Two make-or-break rules: ① Base Color must be "flat"—never paint shadows or highlights into it, or the moment the engine lights it, everything reads dirty; ② Roughness is the soul—wear, grime, new vs. old, it all lives here. Whether a character reads believable is 70% roughness.
Meshy text-to-texture / image-to-texture: one prompt yields a full PBR set (base color + roughness + metallic + normal + emissive). Good enough for background characters and quick color tests.
分钟级 · 控制力弱Substance Painter, using Module 06's bakes to drive wear, full control with layers + masks. The ceiling for hero characters.
慢 · 完全掌控AI lays the base, Substance refines. AI skips the tedious under-painting so you can spend your effort on the face, seams, and story details.
快又可控 · 本节主推In Substance, the maps you baked in 06 aren't there to look at—they're there to drive detail: procedurally generating realistic wear ten times faster than painting by hand:
Curvature → drives edge wear: raised edges automatically expose metal / chip paint.
AO → drives grime in crevices: seams and recesses automatically collect dust and dirt.
Material ID → instant selections: one click selects "all metal parts" or "all leather," then texture each separately.
First let Meshy texture a pass onto your own UVs (turn on enable_original_uv) to get a complete PBR starting point. The more specific the prompt, the better: material + finish + color + amount of wear + style.
For multi-part characters you can give each material slot its own prompt, or use Meshy's local re-texture (select the helmet/sword and change it alone).
[材料+颜色+做工+磨损], PBR, [stylized game / semi-realistic], clean readable surface 示例: weathered steel armor with gold trim, muted blue cloth, leather straps, subtle edge wear, stylized game character, PBR
Put Emissive on whatever should glow: energy runes, screens, lamps. Give the eyes a gold emissive so they light up in the dark—that's the Bluecat signature 🐾.
① Keep base color flat, leave light to the engine. Painting shadows and highlights into base color is the deadliest beginner mistake—change the light and it all goes dirty.
② Roughness tells the story. The same metal reads new, oily, or worn entirely through roughness. It sets the tone more than color does.
③ Let the bakes do the work. Generate wear and grime procedurally from curvature/AO—don't paint it stroke by stroke, it's slow and fake.
▸ All three pass → on to Module 08: Rigging + Animation (🐾 hands-on, the last tough nut).