Modular Assets and Tiling Textures

King Mango

I am trying to make my first big set and am trying to figure out how to break the chunks up into modular pieces and how to texture them.
I want to use a tiling texture as the base and add details with substance painter, but there's too much surface area for the shells to all fit into the 0-1 space and tile. Is it okay nowadays to use more than one shader on a mesh or should I consider further breaking up the mesh into smaller pieces and assembling a prefab in the content browser?
I'm just getting back into it and I was 100 percent convinced that I was biting off something simple LOL
Here's a shot of the piece in question and its UVs:

This is 512x256x64 and I would like one other same sized piece for the , and then two pieces at the ends of 256x256x64
I went 512 thinking that the longer the piece, it would give me more horizontal space but as you can see if the shells were packed closer they would still take up almost two spaces maybe a skosh more.
For all the inset pieces I could use a separate shader but I don't know if that's best practice.

PolyHertz

UV's don't need to be in the 0-1 space. Place them wherever you want and scale them up/down to get the tiling texture to repeat as much as desired. For unique details you could use decals, or create a second UV set that'll be rendered over the tiling one (just give the important parts UV space in the 0-1 range and mask the rest out). You can also switch from repeating to mirrored in your shader if you want the texture to flip for any pixels outside the 0-1 UV boundry.
Alternatively, if you need a lot of unique details, look into the more modern UDIM workflow where each UV tile (range of 0-1, 1-2, etc.) in the UVs is given its own map.

King Mango

awesome. thank you!