pendraia, "maybe someone like Rawn(who is a master of displacement could give us insight into whether he creates them first or further down the track..."

Yes, that would be interesting to get a second opinion. In C4D, you can experiment with bump/displacement in real time with openGL. You can tile a pattern across UV maps and paint bumps directly on the surface. Great fun! Then bake out the result and start the Photoshop master file.

"Still sounds like it was a great seminar...pity I missed it."

The best 40 dollar I ever spent.

surreality, "Distribution is a different animal, and for content creators, the psd approach is extremely limited, particularly when it comes to something like brows, where people tend to want a variety of options."

I can understand that for things like brows and eye color/makeup Photoshop would be overkill. But then again, I am talking cloth never characters. It is not on my table.

But you should never take anything to the extreme. There are still some things that has to be done with shaders, like metall.