Quote - > Quote - (I don't know what they really mean by that - other than seeing lots of nodes scares people? But then lots of nodes produce correct results without manual intervention, so .... )

TBH it's pretty cluttered, with every single node expanded and spread out offscreen.  If the nodes don't need manual intervention, why have them expanded and spread everywhere?  Collapse them and maybe even arrange the collapsed nodes by function.  What if you wanted to mix in a partial bump map or partial texture?  Just leave the map nodes expanded.

Of course, you understand the shader was created with Matmatic. I actually coded a skin shader some time ago in Python which was compiled using matmatic that collapsed nodes and arranged them in stack all neat and tidy, but at the sacrifice of readable code: each math function had to be identified as a node entity in order to manipulate the settings of that node. I don't think that BB (who saw the code) has fully recovered yet. :blink:

Matmatic-generated shaders should, to my view, only be modified with Matmatic, with extremely rare exceptions. If you try to reverse-engineer PR3 (the most commonly used shader that came bundled with VSS) they'd be putting you in a quiet room with nice people giving you sustenance through straws and medication every hour on the hour. What I found most interesting about Matmatic-generated node sets: the compiler would take process-conserving steps to arrive at the result you're anticipating with a given formula, so you'd expect one node set and actually find another. Not sure if I said that correctly, but anyway...

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

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[it is clear that humans have contempt for that which they do not understand] 

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