I'm not much of a fan of texture paddings especially if my uvs are very close to each other. Is texture padding nowadays a thing? I most of the time paint my object on 3d texturing programs. I think texture padding is pretty much usefull only when texturing in 2d programs. Should i use texture padding?
Do you mean that when you apply textures to the UVs, the seams pop up? Instead of applying textures in UV space, you can use triplanar projection to add the textures to your model, that'll hide all the seams.
Texture padding is absolutely necessary when your texture is getting reduced in size according to distance from camera. It's not a matter of personal preference; It's a necessity. Otherwise when your texture shrinks it will grab neighbor pixels in the shells and have unwanted colors appearing all throughout the model.
Let's assume that you're going to use Marmoset Toolbag 3 for baking and Substance Painter for texturing. When baking in MT3, it's advisable to bake with "infinite" (extreme setting) edge padding/dilation for better mipmapping. Bringing baked maps with proper edge padding for SP also helps to work in its viewport with…
Texture edge padding is used to make the edges not having color bleeding from neightbour pixels, when the texture gets mip mapped. http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Edge_padding Using a few pixels wide padding is highly recommended in all cases, but it also doesn't hurt to have it infinite...You know...
Surely this isn't going to be an issue if you just pad your textures after you've finished editing them? It's only necessary for the engine, not in production. Or do you mean in terms of editing baked maps?
You should always have your UV snapshot in a layer if you are working on your textures in a 2d program. That would remedy whatever confusion bleeding might bring. Maybe go 0 dilation/padding while working and add the dilation at the end of the process.