If you want something more like photoshop look at using substance painter. https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-painter It sounds more like you're using substance designer to me.
The way I see it, it's either going all out PBR, or minimalistic diffuse hand-painted look. Also, I believe Substance is far superior to Quixel. If you already own Substance, there's little reason to get Quixel too.
I am making things for my portfolio and am wondering if PBR is going to completely take over. I'd like to take advantage of Quixel and Substance Designer/Painter as well and know they can get amazing results, but I'm wondering how thoroughly its worth knowing the normal spec/gloss route. I hear gloss isn't even used…
One of my problems with Substance is that i feel like i am working with the textures with robotic arms using a remote control through a glass window. With Photoshop i feel like there is no glass window and i can get in there and move textures around precisely and quickly. I was hoping with Quixel i could rotate/cut/crop…
The substance suite can absolutely replace Photoshop completely - I've been using it for a few months now both at work and at home and you can most definitely texture things from start to finish within the suite. This is especially true if you're using an engine that can read SBS files directly (UE4 and Unity5 both do…
Yes! The two workflows (Specular and Metalness) both have their own pros and cons and some artists prefer using one to the other. However, in my opinion I think it is good to familiarise yourself with both. Quixel suite is great but it does seem that more people prefer Substance, although I may be wrong about that.
Unfortunately, if that's your issue with SubstanceD, then I should mention that Quixel has its own "working via remote control on a texture" problems. Quixel can do really neat things, and you *can* work directly on the textures (especially in nDO, which I dig a lot), but I've found it's very easy to confuse the plugin and…
Substance certainly comes with a little different mindset if you are used to photoshop. That's my personal experience atleast. You have to give up some of the control you are used to, but you get some powerful tools in exchange and the biggest pro: You work on all the maps at once instead of copying everything over to make…