Thomas "Art Of Pilgrim" Butters, a skilled 3D Artist and Lead Weapon/Prop Artist at Facepunch Studios, the developer behind Garry's Mod and Rust, has recently shared a concise breakdown highlighting an impressive texturing technique in Substance 3D Painter.
In the breakdown, the artist showed how you can easily paint sculpted folds by adding a new layer with Height information, setting up the Paint effect in the black mask to paint where you want the folds, incorporating Blur Directions to create the falloff, and applying Blur to soften the result. According to the author, the resulting folds are "just pure texture", with the height information stored in the Normal Map. "You can always cut in geometry to support the extra folds," Thomas noted.
