How do you handle texture mapping and material creation to achieve photorealistic results in your 3D product animations?

To achieve photorealistic results in 3D product animations, texture mapping and material creation are key components. Here's how I approach this process:

1. High-Quality Textures

Use High-Resolution Textures: Start with high-quality textures for the base materials. Use 4K or higher resolution maps for close-up shots to capture fine details like fabric weaves or product surface imperfections.

Photographic References: Use real-life references for textures to capture accurate colors, details, and patterns. This helps in mimicking real-world surfaces.

2. PBR (Physically-Based Rendering) Workflow

Albedo/Diffuse Map: The color map is the base texture and should be as accurate as possible to the real-world object.

Roughness and Specular Maps: Use roughness maps to control the surface's smoothness or glossiness. For metals and shiny surfaces, adjust the specular map to reflect light properly.

Normal and Bump Maps: Add details such as small scratches, wrinkles, or pores without adding extra geometry. Normal maps simulate surface detail and work well for realism.

Displacement Maps: For highly detailed surfaces (e.g., the texture of leather, fabric, or stone), displacement maps can physically modify the mesh’s surface for even more realism.

3. Material Settings

Use Realistic Materials: For photorealism, materials should respond to light just like their real-world counterparts. Materials such as metal, glass, plastic, and fabric need to be set with appropriate IOR (Index of Refraction) values, which control how light bends when it enters the material.

Subsurface Scattering (SSS): For organic materials like skin, wax, or translucent plastics, subsurface scattering is essential to replicate how light penetrates the material before scattering.

4. Lighting and Shadows

HDRI for Lighting: Use HDRIs (High Dynamic Range Images) for environment lighting to create realistic reflections and lighting that match the scene's environment.

Realistic Shadows: Use soft shadows for more natural lighting and avoid harsh, unrealistic edges. Use area lights or light probes to achieve softer, more diffused shadows.

5. UV Mapping

Proper UV Unwrapping: Ensure that your 3D models are unwrapped correctly for accurate texture placement. Use a combination of seams and automatic UV unwrapping where needed, ensuring no distortion on the model's surface.

Avoid Stretching: When unwrapping, minimize stretching of textures by keeping the UV islands proportionate to the surface.

6. Surface Imperfections

Add Subtle Details: Small imperfections like fingerprints, scratches, dust, and tiny blemishes add realism. These can be created with dirt maps, grunge maps, or manually painted in texture maps to simulate wear and tear.

Reflection and Gloss: Adjust the reflection and roughness properties to ensure the material reflects light realistically. Matte surfaces should have low gloss and roughness, while metals and plastics should have high gloss and lower roughness.

7. Post-Processing

Color Grading: After rendering, apply color correction or grading in post-production to match the desired look, enhance contrast, and refine highlights/shadows for a more photorealistic finish.

Depth of Field: Use depth of field (DOF) to focus attention on the product, blurring out irrelevant areas and creating a natural photographic effect.

8. Use Real-World Physical Units

Ensure that all materials are set up using real-world measurements (e.g., real-world scale for roughness, bump, and normal maps), which leads to more believable results when light interacts with the materials.

By combining high-quality textures, accurate material properties, realistic lighting, and subtle surface imperfections, you can achieve photorealistic results in 3D product animations.

Hope this helps ! 

It actually depends on client demand, most of the time tweaking with shader in Blender completes the job, but sometimes it needs to do PBR using substance to achieve the result we want

Using PBR textures is always recommended for photorealistic product renderings.
Imperfections are present on every texture in this world. So its really important to use some imperfection maps to give more visual appeal and it will ultimately provide realistic render.

Once PBR textures are used, projecting the textures onto the object is the next thing. It's necessary to unwrap and project the textures in such a way that it has minimum texture stretching across the part or product in which the texture is applied. Using correct Projection technique will ultimately provide realistic product render.

Custom textures are taxing on the computer, that is the only reason I avoid creating my own textures.

.It the one of the most important things about 3D products, 100% Vector images are the best ones, Like AI, Or PDF

Usually, you can get these files from the creator of the labels, you need the label files before they are sent it to the print house.

Convert it to 8K or more and use it in high detail as you want