I've seen some nice plugins for Maya that allow you to bake gradient textures for your models, making it easier to handpaint details after. Some even add effects on edges, etc. Does anyone recommend anything for Blender?
Yeah - you can use the gradient node, but also a ton of other things : baking an AO pass, an Object Space normalmap (the green channel of which will give a mask for everything facing up), tiling any texture that you want for details, which you can then mask using a texture painted directly in Blender, or using vertex…