Which do you think I should use for texturing, Mari or Substance Painter? I know Mari is expensive, but I don't care about the price. Substance Painter is procedural, but Mari isn't. Also, in Mari you have to paint each channel individually. However, Mari can support incredibly high resolution textures (which I might want sometimes). Should I get Mari, or should I wait until Substance Painter can support 24000x24000 textures?
Really for a starter, I would start with blender built in texture paint options, at least to start with to get a good feeling about things.
You can do a lot with blender texture paint.
As for mari vs substancep ainter, I think both have 30 days trials so why not test them see how it fells, if money is not a concern...
Personally I think I would go for painter, to be honest I do not see why you would ever need such huge textures, and specially since you can make good use of procedurals or paint different maps at once.
This is also practical a texture so big will be using way too much memory, and would be overkill even for a set of 4 4K monitors
n647 About Blender's texturing tools: They're horrible, and pretty much an afterthought. You can't even select which channel you want to paint on from a menu or use non-circular brushes (such as Substance Painter's dirt brushes), which are both elementary for even the most basic texturing.
The reason why I want such huge textures is because I want to view some objects from both up close and far away.
From what I hear, Mari is significantly better at texturing organic surfaces than Substance Painter.
There is a third option, which is to get both programs, generate low resolution smart materials in Substance Painter, and detail them in Mari. I doubt it would work, though, and it sounds wasteful.
Actually, hand painting everything doesn't sound so bad. What must really be tedious is painting on one channel, switching to another channel, and trying to repeat your previous stroke exactly, and if you make just one mistake, it looks really weird.
williamatics I agree with n647 about Blender's inbuild texture paint capacities, it's quite powerful and complete although you do have a point by mentionning its limitation. The workflow can be tedious as well but I see it as a good way to learn how things work.
That being said, Substances handles UDIM (see this link https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/spdoc/udim-144310352.html) so that might be an argument in favor of Substance to avoid using humongous textures (24k for a still render is """"fine"""" - I emphasize the quotation mark - but for any animation or video game it MUST be avoided: too heavy for the hardware).
williamatics well I do not think blender has the best 3D paint tools on the market, but I think your getting the wrong impression on them, true you can not pick the map from a menu, if I remember right you do it from the node editor is a bit different but not a bad workflow in my opinion, would not say this is better or worse, using nodes with this and painting masks you can emulate the idea of painting several layers at the same time (a node with a mask texture controlling base color, roughness, and a normal or heightmap for example).
And also you are not limited to a circular brush, it uses the same brush system as for sculpting, you can apply alphas of any shape to get brushes of any shape you want, you can adjust the blend mode, the fallout, and how to apply it be stencils, curves etc...
as far as I know where blender falls behind is with UDIM, and I may be wrong?
Still if you find that applying different maps by hand is a problem thats a strong point for substance painter, I think that will se much more use than huge textures you may only occassionally use on Mari
EDIT: some of the real things I think blender paint tools are lacking are 2D transform like tools and a blur node or tools, like a lot of nodes you can find in substance designer for manipulating the texture in different ways
I don't know why you'd need such large textures, especially when you say "I might want sometimes". If price isn't an issue then just try them both. Personally I stick with the Substance tools myself.
I might need textures that size if I'm texturing a really large mesh, such as a building or landscape. What's UDIM?
williamatics did you check the link I shared ? Basically UDIM is why you don't need huge textures. It's an enhancement of UV mapping and texturing, in which you don't use one big texture but rather a matrix of smaller textures, which is much easier to optimize once you split your mesh into sub-part that you unwrap on the said matrix. Each sub-part has its own resolution.
tbrbn "At the moment Substance Painter has a limited support for UDIMs tile. A full support that will allow to paint across multiple UDIMs is currently in development. "
Does that mean I should get Mari? How long do you think it will be until Substance Painter allows painting across multiple texture sets?