I don’t disagree. But often you’ll come across materials with patterns that are just too complicated to create with the variations they have with the tools we have. Keep in mind the tools we have in Cycles are extremely limited. I.e. if you do fabrics you may look into twill patterns:
I’m sure all of these can be done mathematically with some node trickery. But why, when you only need a tiny image or just a few pixels to control it - the rest of the fabric material can still be fully procedural.
I was there myself. I had to do things procedurally. Although there was no need to, I needed to know for myself if I could do it, ref the absolute crazyness in the top of this thread.
Then there is also the concept of efficiency. When you need tons and tons of generators in Cycles to do the job (because they are too basic), it comes slowing to a crawl producing anything with it. Good looking scratches is a typical thing where I would use blended images over all the generators needed. Sometimes even the blending procedure is coming to a crawl, like the blended triplanar (from a sixplanar) mapping which doesn’t even work in Eevee due to being too complex - and that’s just for blending! In Blender it takes three nodes just to lerp two numbers (if you want to visualize those numbers).
Don’t get me wrong, understanding nodes is a very handy skill. But think outside the box:
- You don’t always have to use nodes for everything, just because you can.
- or have to avoid UVs.
- or think that UVs only have just one use.
Instead, be flexible in your mindset. The gsoc node update looks extremely promising with better voronoi, vector and math nodes.