I bought an add-on. Extreme PBR

 I'd seen a lot of recommendations about Extreme PBR. Everyone says how good it is. It's expensive, though. And I have other tools that do some of the same things. There's a sale on and 25% is a pretty good discount, so I picked it up.

Minute 5

Complicated! Very complicated. I immediately started to think that I will end up not using this because it's not intuitive, and there are a hundred right-in-your-face buttons. Naturally, you go to the documentation and the YouTube videos. This is what happened to Fluent Materializer: great tool, but too much work to get started.

Minute 20

Okay, the Texture Paint video finally revealed what's going on, and it's pretty neat. 

In default Blender, you can mask between separate materials, although more commonly, you'll use the Mix Shader to mask between different sources that you project into a single material slot. This quickly makes for a lot of nodes and a lot of spaghetti.


Extreme does all this on steroids. It can support up to four different materials within the same slot. Instead of using a separate mask for each layer (expensive!), it creates a mask that contains a colour for each material channel, Red, Green, Blue and Black. You then paint or remove those colours from the lask layer to expose the corresponding material. 

Imagine building this node tree by hand. <Cue Twilight Zone Music>

The quick paint effort on the test object took me about three minutes to set up and paint. Looking in the shader tree, you can see how this tasty sausage is made. It demonstrates precisely why node trees are not very friendly. Nodes give you near unlimited power to mix and blend different things together, but node trees very quickly become complex to the point where they stop any chance of flow unless you are a seasoned expert.

Onwards

I've only just scratched the surface. Extreme is capable of many amazing material feats, but I need to keep up with the learning, or I will never go beyond the first set of functions.