Using multiple premade textures to create new layered material combinations and using texture painting which are affected by noise textures is a good workflow to learn for texturing.
This shield has several different materials that are layered using masks and some of them are painted. Later it is all baked into one texture.
For teaching materials, the challenge is to create something a student can model in a reasonable time so that the actual texturing of the model is the lecture.
Techniques:
Modelled in Blender using some modifiers and box modelling to get the correct shape.
Sculpted with Blender to bring damage and wear to the shield.
Baked normals from highpoly to a lowpoly version of the shield inside Blender.
Then used several different materials with masks and noise textures to bring out grunge, rust and peeled paint. Some heightmap tricks have been used to bring out the paint layers height.
In the end everything gets baked into one set of textures and the object is demoed inside Unity.
All phases are recorded and put out to Youtube for students to watch later.
Main idea is going from this which would be hard to reproduce or at least computationally expensive to do
To this, simple textures that can be used in game engines.
