FVerbaas posted at 1:04 PM Wed, 27 December 2023 - #4479656

I was thinking more on an actual 'intelligence' side: on a garment recognise the areas where wear and fading occur and given the data of the fabric apply to the 'as woven' seamless textures the effects thereof. 

Ah yeah, I see. When generating texture sets in Substance Painter, the wear and tear effects are generated from the normal maps, or by comparing a high res mesh to a low res mesh.

In the latter, all of the detail is sculpted into the high res mesh and then the normal, cavity, and roughness maps are generated by the differences. It's the cavity maps that control where the wear and tear appears, but the cavity maps typically aren't distributed, they are only used internally by Substance Painter. The diffuse, roughness, and normal maps are used to create the final fabric, which will respond correctly to light positions.