/3/ - 3DCG

>>728324
On the sides of the parapets? Not that I know of. The main idea is to have everything as continuous as possible. The more things are broken up, the bigger your chance for visible seams and baking errors, even in things like Substance. I've not had baking issues when I do it like how I showed earlier though. At least not in Substance which has a pretty good baker.

>>728339
Well first it's a good idea to have almost identical topology. That being said you should have decent results using the pack function with the Magic UV addon Blender comes with. Assuming all of the islands are similar in size first. If not, it might behoove you to re-think how the sides are made.
Maybe just make one side, then use an array modifier with "object offset" turned on, and "relative offset" turned off. Add an empty to the center point of where you want to rotate from, set the array to the number of sides, and then rotate the empty on the Z-axis. You should rotate it by 360 divided by the number of sides to get a full circle. Then you only need to unwrap one side and all the others will stack and do the same thing. If I were you as well, I'd probably add the little in-between parts too to a single side.

>And finally, is texture painting directly in Blender frowned upon?
No but there are better tools to do it. I don't know the exact workflow to do it in Blender, though I have seen people do it. Just search "Texture painting in Blender" or something, there's tons.
Here's one from a quick cursory search.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcCQKuWPhXk