Tthanks for all the advice folks.
sounds like my workflow may be antiquated, or more effort then its worth, and either
using internal shaders, or uvmaps with external textures seems to be the consensus
as to how to achieve this.
If your goal is to save time… then you are better off learning to do it in 3D.
There may be some specific effect you would want to accomplish in Photoshop, but that wouldn’t be the way to go for everything….
