I need help with finding the right workflow for my map-creation

Hi there,

lets say i wanted to create a simple wooden plank, with some details, something like this one here:



I need this for a small wooden shack i've built in 3dsmax. Every wooden plank is a rectangle, here is a small screenshot of my scene:



I'm usually a 2D guy, but i love using 3D for setting up certain structures and stuff and i would like to step my 3D game up a little, so please bear with me if i'm not aware of some standards please! I'm here to learn.

I was thinking about handpainting the texture in photoshop on a map and apply it to every plank, adjust the positioning slightly to get variations.

I'm not sure, but i recall having seen something, where you create a bigger map, with lots of texture-information, for different objects and just position them accordingly, i hope you know what i mean, how's that called?

But that would just give me an Albedo-Map, i still need a Normal map with Details. I could paint a height-map, but that's too much to render..

I could also model and polypaint 3-4 planks in zbrush, but from what i know the normals wouldn't work on these basic planks as i would have to replace them with lowest Subdiv one out of zbrush. So i basically had to rebuild everything with the subdiv replacements.

I don't own or know much about Substance-Designer, could i load 3-4 different lengths of planks into the program and create variations of my details there? I could just switch up the masks and seeds for every plank? 

How would you do this kind of stuff?