ID5 populates the scene with procedural content first of all before the artists dive in and place stuff.
More like, proceduraly lay down tiling bitmap textures, where the type - grass, dirt, rock etc - depends on height and slope, and add some randomization within the different tilesets.
Procedural textures on their own look artificial, sometimes even ugly. They usually have very little relation with the underlying forms (where dirt, scratches, wear etc should go), and absolutely no artistic sense (where it would look good).
For example our artists can add such details in three ways:
- generate it using procedurals
- use photo textures of real dirt, grime, etc. and blend them in using Photoshop layers and such
- manually paint it using a tablet and a 3D texture painting app
We almost exclusively rely on methods two and three, prefering hand painted stuff most of the time.
There was one case, with the Armies of Exigo intro, where a large number of armour pieces were generated within Photoshop using actions. They've used procedural edge and dirt masks generated from the geometry, and a very large set of various bitmap textures that were combined together using these masks. It looked good, but not as cool as the fully hand painted stuff for Mark of Chaos.