I'm still alive! Just giving another update...
Still working on the same area for ages now... The panel lines has taken several attempts to get it looking good and being reasonably easy to create (that still needs work, it's still taking a lot of time, even though even in FPS mode you can't really see mistakes).
I definitely need to somehow cut down on the number of materials it uses, 33 so far
BUT.... a lot of the materials reuse the same texture, so not as bad with memory usage, but still bad for draw calls. I used to have a shader method that let you paint the hull with the 7 different texture styles (bare hull, dull black, shiney red, steel, blue...etc) but that was hard to maintain and didn't really work very well.
The main hull is comprised of two different texture sets (sets = diffuse & rough & metal). The clean bare texture is a simple 512 tiled texture similar to how SC is supposed to be designed. The bare hull, steel hull, aluminum hull, dull black, shiney red, dullish blue and caution stripes are the choices .
Then on a different UV channel (2) there's a scratched/stained map (4k map). This one is more complicated and needs to have the textural space big enough to reasonable show off the details without being too blurry. The bearcat uses one per tiling panel set (blue,black, steel,bare, red, caution), except for the bare hull that uses 4. I use Substance Painter to create this texture since it does a nice job with edges. BTW this texture will look a bit weird, it contains information about the scratches/stains ONLY (there is an opacity texture with this one). A shader merges this layer with the underlaying texture to create a worn damaged look.
