There’s lots of technicalities when it comes to using nodes, but if you ask me, almost everyone, like 95% of people just goes at it by feel. You see people doing stuff on tutorials and you imitate it, you remember you saw someone doing this trick and you emulate it, you start getting a feel of what you want in your material and you add a node here and there and before you know it, you have a noodle that makes you look super professional. All that talk to say, don’t worry too much if you think you’re not getting it all, like you should know what every single setting does, because truth is, you get the feel of it all up to a point, after that is just a lot of adding stuff to see what it does. As you see more and more material building you’ll start to get the feel. I remember Andrew Price saying after 10 years of using Blender, he finally understood the Color Ramp node, and the guy pumps out art in spite of it. That’s what I mean, that the technical is not as impacting as we set out to believe.
