Texture your prop in Pigment

What you'll learn#

You will bake the detail of your sculpt onto the light mesh, then build a PBR material on top of it in Pigment. This is where the prop stops looking like grey clay and starts looking like a real object.

Before you start#

• Finish Rebuild clean topology with Retopo. You need both meshes: the dense sculpt and the light quad mesh.
• Pigment is a backed module. It runs on WebGL.
• Worth knowing: a PBR material is a set of channels, not a single image. Pigment works with exactly seven: baseColor, roughness, metallic, normal, height, ao and emissive.

Steps#

1. Bring the light mesh into Pigment with Send to Pigment from Retopo, or import a .glb, .gltf or .obj.

2. Bake the high-poly detail onto the low-poly. Open the Baker, load your sculpt as the high-poly, choose a Bake Type, and run it. The button reads Bake from High-Poly once a high-poly is loaded, and Bake All runs a batch of the types you ticked.

   Tip: the baker offers twelve types. Normal and AO carry most of the visual payoff. Curvature and thickness matter less on their own, but the mask generators in step 6 read them, so bake them too.

3. Check the baked normal map on the model. Every crease you cut in Sculpt should now be readable on a mesh that has none of that geometry. If a crease is missing, it was probably too subtle to bake.

4. Add a fill layer as your base. A fill layer covers the whole model with one set of channel values, which gives you a consistent starting point instead of an empty surface.

5. Set the base values for your material. Rock is a rough, non-metallic surface, so push roughness high and leave metallic at zero.

   Warning: metallic is close to a binary choice in PBR. Real surfaces are either metal or not. Mid values look wrong under most lighting.

6. Add a second layer for wear, and drive it with a generated mask rather than painting it by hand. The edge wear and curvature generators find the exposed edges of your prop automatically, using the maps you baked in step 2.

   Tip: this is why baking curvature paid off. The generator does the work of finding every edge, which on a sculpted rock would take a long time by hand.

7. Add dirt in the recesses with an ambient occlusion or dirt generator. Wear on the edges and dirt in the cavities is most of what makes a surface read as used.

8. Browse Smart Materials for a ready-made starting point. They come with their own layer stack and masks, and you can adjust them once applied rather than building everything from scratch.

9. Paint by hand only where it counts: a stain, a chipped corner, a colour variation the generators cannot infer.

10. Export the texture set. Pigment ships an Export Preset for Unity Standard, Unreal Engine, Blender/Cycles, Substance Painter, Godot 4, V-Ray and a custom one, so pick the one that matches your target rather than exporting channels one by one.

Result#

Your prop now carries a full PBR material: baked surface detail, a believable base, edge wear and dirt where they belong. It is ready to be lit.

Going further#

• Next in the pipeline: light the prop in Render, or drop it straight into Engine.
• Explore projection modes (triplanar, planar, cylindrical, spherical) when a texture does not sit the way you want on a curved surface.
• Try the material node graph once you are comfortable with the layer stack.