Where does photoshop fit into a production pipeline?
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Substance Painter is pretty amazing and I have been using it for awhile now, however I have still not learned photoshop. I'm curious to why photoshop is considered an industry standard software and by extension I want to know what is the go to software for making stylized textures for "unique assets". Is photoshop only used for making tilables and is just a bad option for unique textures?
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No, you can do any kind of texturing with Photoshop, why do you think everyone is using Substance Painter?
They don't have to be. But they can be. And in some cases it's faster, in others it's slower.
Substance has been around a while but it's fair to say that it started taking over in AAA two or three years ago, when they released Painter and started evangelizing hard, touring studios and pitching it. Despite the hype it really is objectively better than Photoshop for our purposes when you consider Designer and Painter as two halves of one program. Photoshop and Substance files both work as node networks but the key difference is that Photoshop's nodes (called layers) have to be assembled linearly (a stack) whereas Substance allows for nonlinear node combinations. You can have one node that directly feeds into many others across different outputs (albedo, gloss, normal, etc. all being updated simultaneously). This is much harder to achieve in Photoshop because of the linear node order. You end up having to use smart objects and clipping masks to propagate changes through different groups, or else you end up having to manually copy masks and layers between groups... it's just nowhere near as convenient.
Adobe doesn't care about game use because their market is so big and there's no indication that they ever plan to change this fundamental aspect of Photoshop. So, if you don't already use it, I would honestly recommend you stick to Substance as your main texturing tool (and learn both Designer and Painter). It's still useful to know Photoshop for image editing or as a backup, and people that know it well can still compete with Substance users in terms of quality, but it's basically got a handicap.
Of course, this can be easily remedied by having a 3D modeling software/game engine open and sync your photoshop files with that of the material editor so everything updates rapidly. But depending on your computer, this may be either super slow or buggy.
Before when I textured in Photoshop only, without looking at my 3D model I felt like it was easy to get your scale wrong. So something you might realize a brick wall texture has very large bricks when it should in fact be smaller but if you were painting directly on a model, those issues get caught immediately. And if you're working at very low resolution (like 64 x 64. Talking retro game development here!) you also have to watch out for uv islands bleeding into each other.
You could also give a look into Affinity Photo.
I use Affinity Photo to quickly turn Vectorshapes, Brush strokes
or Text on curves into Normal/Height maps for further usage in Substance Painter.
kinda mind blowing to hear about people not knowing why to use photoshop or similar in this line of work. what kind of textures are we talking here - tiles? could not imagine completing a character entirely in 3D.
oh and i also use the smudge finger to smear around in normal maps, displacement, whatever. all the time - and with pride!
Because it's like crashing your car and then using a hammer to beat the body panels back into shape.
I mean, say I have a mech with like 800 parts, Either I spent Hours getting that "perfect bake" (which I dont even think exist ) with hundreds of hand made cages, OR I spend 20 minutes fixing up small errors in PS.
I choose PS.
Choose PS, Choose Life.
Dont ask me why i spent 3 minutes of my life making this...at least I made it in Photoshop.
The thing is that people usually take everything that is said as an absolute rule. This is similar to that old talk about everything need to be all quads.
And I am talking not about Quixel meagscans . They are too small imo. I use much bigger scans and need a good 2d composer to solve a tricky part of turning them into tiling textures , looking not too repetitive but still unique and real at the same time. All the robotic "make it tile" things can't do it good enough. You have to manually and carefully re-compose fragments evaluating and adapting each part separetly. Substance designer has too basic composing/correction tools for that and works terribly slow with photogrammetry hi res inputs.
Photoshop is also a kind of a pain in the a... . I have more hope on Affinity Photo and Photoline now.
ps. Substance Designer is still the best for road tiles kind of things