Face_off - I totally get that you wanted to make your system as foolproof as possible. Its a classic tradeoff. The script I'm intending to make is no substitute for a well-crafted integrated solution like yours. For people who make new shaders, like me, my proposed script will get around the editing/tweaking problems. All I want is to be able to quickly manipulate some key parameters in a complex shader tree on many zones. If those zones don't agree or are corrupted, so be it. I also think the script will make it easier for me to share my complex shaders - having obvious knobs is important. People will have more fun with them if they don't have to understand and navigate the nodes to make adjustments. BTW: Face_off, did you know that the three parameters of a Normal node can be used to compute the dot product of a particular vector with the normal directly? I was reading your shader thing and you extract each component of the vector, then multiply. That's a waste of effort. Just put the 3 coefficients into the normal node directly. The only problem with it is that the normal node is interpreted as a "color" and gets converted to a scalar by summing the 3 components and dividing by 3. But if you premultiply your coefficients by 3, or multiply by 3 in the next stage, you are good to go.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)