Stylization

Hand-Painted Textures

Painted lighting baked into albedo

Also known as: Hand painted · Stylized texture

Definition

Hand-painted texturing is a stylized workflow where lighting, shadows, and highlights are painted directly into the albedo map, rather than calculated at runtime via PBR. This is the style of World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Torchlight, and most mobile RPGs. The look is consciously flat and graphic; a hand-painted asset retains its appearance under any lighting because there is no separate lighting computation reading PBR channels.

In production

Authored in Substance Painter, Photoshop, or 3DCoat's paint room, hand-painted texturing is a workflow closer to 2D illustration than 3D texturing — artists block shadows and highlights with brushes following the form, typically starting with a mid-tone base, then layering a warm ambient-occlusion pass in multiply mode before painting directional highlights on a separate screen or overlay layer. World of Warcraft's asset pipeline caps most textures at 512x512 or 1024x1024 precisely because the painted style hides the low resolution that would be obvious on a PBR-lit surface at the same size. A common mistake newcomers make is painting highlights that only make sense from one fixed camera angle, which reads as wrong the moment the camera orbits; experienced hand-painters keep light direction consistent with the game's actual fixed camera angle rather than an arbitrary front-on light. Because there's no separate lighting computation reading PBR channels, the same painted asset renders identically in a bright outdoor zone and a dark dungeon, which is exactly the point.