You should really use the "presets" as kind of a starting point if you are going to use them. From there jump into the mask editor and you can customize the hell out of it switching which textures are in the masks and the strength, fall off, contrast + layer styles all all of the mask components - it's very powerful.…
They are both pretty awesome and i think either way you go you will be happy. Personally I've got both but have found with the way I work Quixel has been better - with my personal work flow I like its all incorporated into photoshop and there is little jumping back and forth between applications but the biggest bonus for…
Personally, I dont see how you can maintain a consistent look between assets in a non-node workflow. This comes to the forefront when working with multiple assets and re visions.
You are right that there is no shape or lasso tools yet in Painter, but you can still paint on the normal map channel, Painter comes with hundreds of hard surface normal map stamps, and you can of course import a normal map created with nDo. Also the next update will allow you to see the normal map conversion of your…
If you don't care that all your textures look like the default dDo presets, then yes, dDo is really fast and good. The huge amount of presets it comes with are really the biggest selling point in my mind. I haven't used 2.0 yet but if there isn't an expanded ability to create your own material presets and more impotrantly…