I held off on Windows 10 for as long as I could until my job required it. Now this nonsense. I hope this isn't the start of them joining on the web DRM bandwagon.
Why do you use adobe products? I tried Photoshop about 10 years ago, when i was developing a DLC for a game (multilayer textures up to 4096*4096 with addition, substract effects with AO map, normal, specular maps) it was totally ok with GIMP, but with photoshop it crashed as used about 6x more RAM than gimp for the same file 🤣 and i didnt see any improvement over GIMP. Maybe now it would be different due to the AI things in ps, or maybe not 😆
I didnt paid for it. I created non organic assets (vehicles), and optimized them as possible, including efficient uv maps and easy to repaintable texture, so the automatic uv mapping of such tools wouldnt be a good choice
Oh man at least try substance painter once, it takes the hassle out of creating PBR textures and materials. It's a really good investment. Probably the best tool for creating complex materials and textures.
It works almost exactly like Photoshop with layers and generators with the added benefit of being able to paint your materials onto a model and stack those materials ontop of each other in real time.
Then when you're done you hit export and choose a preset that defines what gets exported like Colour, Metal, Rough, Normal, AO etc or you can create your own and pack multiple textures together (I pack metal, rough and AO together then split the RGB and split the channels in Unreal or Unity to save memory). You can do non PBR too so you have diffuse, gloss, normal etc
I think there was a misunderstanding on my part. Substance Painter was designed to be used with your 3D models to paint, if you lack the actual 3D model then Substance isn't suitable for your workflow. But if you have access to the model and the UV map your painting onto isn't malformed (UDIMs or overlapping islands) then this is what Substance was designed to do.
Then it can't be used for community repaints. Of course i wont share the source 3D model with the community, just the exported ingame model, as its payware
Yes, there are tools to paint on models many years ago, i've seen this in blender 10+ years ago, but its not suitable to support after release repaints, also automatic uv maps are not efficiently use the texture (too many small islands, with padding between).
Apologies my experience is with video games. Useally creating seams and manually unwrapping is my go-to method because I can control exactly how an object is unwrapped(though no padding can cause issues with really low texture resolutions because islands will bleed into each other). Then i use Substance to create all the textures and export them into the desired configuration and format.
Though I assume your textures will be saved in a format that preserves the layers so the user can isolate the body paint and the decals if they need to change them (don't have much experience with that pipeline).
Useally what I do for decals is have them as a separate material using an atlas texture (grayscale only for alpha mask so players can choose decal colors) if users need to modify it but as you mention you can only have one material.
Also I want to guess that is a diffuse map for a train, never have the patience to do 1 to 1 recreations of real life vehicles (people get really picky about detail)