I don't know if you are familiar with Blender. I just mention it because it is totally free. I found a hacked workflow which isn't very elegant but works. 1. Create all of your solid color layers as rgba .png 2. Stack the textures in Blender in the same material. Set render mode in 3d window to "glsl" and material set to…
You can automate everything in SD. Actually not in SD directly, but there are command line tools for the bakers, so you can call them from any software or just through a script and bake as many meshes as needed at once.
Recently I've been doing: Photoshop > 3dcoat. Previously I'd use Zbrush's projection painting while working on a texture. I'll still do that from time to time but have started using Photoshop's 3d painting for projection stuff lately. 3d coat is nice, its super fast, relatively easy to get meshes set up in. I really like…