Hand-painting is really painful to me and I am not good at it either.
My learning progress has been so far so good, until I started this hand-painting lesson and I had procrastinated for this for days.
I have heard of substance painter which seems to me an easier and more effective solution for creating textures.
I guess if hand-painting is not that crucial, might be it is okay to skip it first and go other topics?
Hey,
I would say that you should definitely give substance a try. If you have good uvs, its pretty easy to get a decent looking result there. But in order to get most out of it, there is still a lot of things to learn.
Procedural effects and all that substance painter magic will only take you about 80% of the way to a finished result, but if you want it too look really good, you will still have to paint a lot of stuff manually. But even when you get there its still easier than hand painting in blender for example (at least I think, I didnt do too much hand painting in blender, I went to substance as soon as I learned that it exists) , because you can paint multiple channels at once. So for example if you want to paint a scratch on something, you can paint the color, height and roughness information at the same time.
Another huge benefit of substance is that if you use fill layers and masks (instead of painting everything in just one paint layer), the whole thing is non-destructive and you can change anything at any time.
Substance Painter is the best texture painting application today. It's better than Blender texture painting.
That said, Substance is a commercial product. You get a free 30-day trial and can have an free educational license if you're an active student or teacher. But beyond that you'll have to pay the subscription fee. Please don't entertain the temptation to pirate software.
This is where Blender is worth learning as an inferior texture painting application. But if you can afford substance, it's the better app (right now) for sure.
Also if you're a student, you can get the educational license for free,which is pretty cool.
Thank you for your advice.
I will give it a try, and perhaps get a stylus too if there will be quite a lot hand painting.
Don't give up on the painting, man. I think you will surprise yourself at how fast you can get the hang of it. A graphics tablet makes things easier, too. I got an XP-Pen Deco Pro, and of the non-screen tablets that, apparently, is the best one. I am no professional artist but for only $125, I figured I may as well go with quality.