UV Unwrapping
Before I could start texturing my models I had to unwrap each fully by hand so that they could be imported into substance painter and easily textured by UV shell groups such as the arms, legs, head etc. If unwrapped badly textures will be stretched, the wrong scale or in the wrong place on the model.
Although there are options such as Automatic unwrapping in Maya it generally only works well for objects that are aligned with the axis otherwise the automatic unwrapping may also stretch textures. That is mainly due to how it effectively takes a picture from each face cube around the object, meaning if a surface is slanted it will unwrap as if that slanted surface is flat and give a bad UV unwrap.
Substance Painter
With Substance Painter I have access to a wide variety of textures and generators (generators apply an effect to a surface such as dirt or edge wear) along with Arnold AIStandardSurface textures in Maya which I used to get a realistic glass texture for my lantern.
For the metal texture of my lantern I used a mix of base metal textures, a dirt generator and an edge wear generator. Instead of simply using images for my textures substance painter includes various map types in their materials such as normal maps, roughness and metallic which allows Arnold lighting to interact with the surface of objects I’ve textured.
One example would be the basement which when a light passes over the floor, various shadows can be seen due to its normal map.
Other maps like metallic tell the render engine if something is made of metal or not which often decides how reflective a surface is even when the surface is not metal.
Base Colour
Metallic
Roughness
AO (Ambient Occlusion)
e
Normal
