I am hoping to identify the following (4) things:
#1. a free or commercially available set of various widgets that are commonly used for mechanical structures, mainly military vehicles and buildings, and armored characters. . Namely (most of the thing past normals are usually model specific):
traction patterns
vinyl
carbon fiber
pegs
nails
intakes
insets
panels
etc
#2. the best workflow, presumably between something in Blender (can blender paint normal map widgets?), Substance Painter for instancing premade features onto texture layers (consisting of normal map etc).
The following is a good illustration I presume for the workflow between normal map features and mesh:
#3. Is there a workflow in Substance Painter,Mari or anywhere else for directly creating hard surface features effectively onto mesh, namely I would presume something like the following features:
drawing shapes with subdivided lines,edges with variable creasing
drawing various standard shapes like circles (with variable vertices)
assigning normal map height to delienated shapes
I realize that this can be done in various workflows from Microsoft Paint, to Photoshop, to texture Normal Map tools to Substance Painter. I am looking for quite a convenient method with surface painting ideally and real time preview.
#4 What is the workflow for high resolution, cinematic quality production with insets and holes in continuous meshes?
This also reflects the fact that my known workflows for adding holes in a continious mesh avoiding subdivision artifacts is tedious and either breaks edge loops or adds a ton of edge loops. There are 3 relevant topology workflows that I know of.
Holes and insets at the rate that occur in the above examples, for example in a continuous mesh making up the a continuous panel of a vehicle, would be a nightmare to manage the topology for because any changes would require cleaning up the mesh. It’s very hard to relocate holes and insets that span multiple edge loops.