Texturing Workflow

I started making some textures using a process where the normal map is a basis for the rest of the texture, rather than having a diffuse map being the driving force for the normal map to conform to. This technique means only a small amount of photo texture needs to used and keeps the texture fresh and prevents it from being muddy. The blue channel in the normal map can be used as a quick way of generating a basic ambient occlusion to overlay in the texture and works well in picking out the details directly from the hand painted normal map using custom brushes and the Nvidia filter plug-in for Photoshop.

Here is the result rendered out in Marmoset, 4 planes have been put together to show the tiling capability and how variation can be achieved using only a division of four on the original texture.