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The best advancement I've seen in texturing solutions recently (and really in the last 20 years) is Houdini's ability to smoothly blend the transitions between colored selections in a subdivided surface. This is especially useful with procedurally produced meshes and volume meshes. Instead of the jagged and sharp boarders you get in C4D between different colored poly selections in a subdivided surface, in Houdini you can get a smooth and attractive blend. In fact I think you can even assign colors to individual points as well as polys, and blend between them by leaving the points or polys in-between unassigned a color.

I just did the occasional unwrapping job and seeing a thread in this forum here about projections I realized that there is basically zero innovation in texturing in the last 15 years. We still do it like we did in 2005 or so…The only thing that came to the industry is triplanar algorithm that is not much more than an iteration of cubic mapping. We still need uvs. We still project and bake the mappings. The same way just easier with fewer clicks. But no real intelligent new algorithms introduced. Not much new right? On the other hand we have seen a numerous amount of render engines, modeling tools etc come and go…texturing is not getting much attention right?

We also had in c4d ptex technology as external plugin (almost 15 years ago) I think not developed anymore...

I've had external drives lose data mainly because of the junky interfaces/chipsets used in some caddys and external hard drive enclosures and usually during boot up or shut down. I too would recommend a fat internal drive for storing all models, textures, references, vdbs, hdr and things in an assets folder. If you want to, get an external drive and do a one way sync between them once a month or so as a backup. As a contingency, I'd look at something like EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard or similar for recovering files that were lost from a screwed partition/drive. For files that were deleted on working drives I try to remember to use Recuva (free version). There are also online backup options like Crashplan (I use), Backblaze or others.

Edit > Preferences > import/export > wavefront obj import > invert transparency

your materials in the screenshot have the alpha channel enabled. If you uncheck that channel, you should be able to remove the xray effect.