I never bake any materials onto the object, but use tiled textures on different parts. I can further combine these with other materials in TG (merge shader and mix by PF) or add procedural variation and/or textures.
I don't know Blender, but I use Lightwave for hard objects, and ZBrush for soft ones, also use ZBrush for making the UV-maps, and often Lightwave again to shift parts of the UV map around. Finally, almost always Poseray to check, do normals again if needed and merge object parts.