Which texture channels to bake?

[TroyT 6]

I'm about to begin texturing about 50 models for an A3 mod that we're building.  I'll be using Substance Painter and would love some guidance on which channels to bake.  I've been using a "more is better" approach while learning how to do this, but with the workload ahead of me, I'd like to optimize my flow.  Currently, I'm using:

• Diffuse
• Specular
• Glossiness
• Height
• Normal
• Emissive
• Base Color
• Ambient occlusion
• Specular level

I'm sure that I don't need all of these.  The current project is mostly buildings and building parts with concrete, metal, and wood textures.  I'd also appreciate some guidance on when to deviate from the list.  When an object has glass, highly reflective metal, etc.

 

Also, I'm baking my textures/models and then export the images to PNG using an Arma-specific export config preset I found somewhere.  I then comp the individual image types (CO, CA, AS, NOHQ, etc into single images in Photoshop.  Of course, I have yet to actually use the textures other than the main CO texture... another area that I need to delve into. Any advice, on any of these topics, would be greatly appreciated as well.

[PuFu 4600]

for everything related to structures and buildings, i suggest you have a look over multimaterials 

 

[TroyT 6]

Thank you, that helps.  I now have all of my textures looking great.

 

One more question:

The mod I'm creating provides many new building components for Exile.  The materials that I've used on some of the components are metallic.  I love using the SMDI texture file generated but am concerned about server overload.  Will using the SMDI channel increase CPU demand on our servers substantially or at all?  If I don't use that channel they look fine, but in a completely different way.