The current iteration of UV and shader texture mapping has been a major success and a good improvement over the old setup. But, there's a number of issues that need to be address. One of the biggest is the texture mapping setup. The 8 outer squares are each of the 8129x8129 texture maps used to drive the shaders in the custom shader network.

What do we see first and foremost? Most of them are almost completely white. White here indicates to the blender-utility to use color 1 (in my network, this is essentially means the lower "layer") instead of color 2. Color 2's input is the shader we're layering on top, provided where the texture is black. White essentially means "transparent" on the current layer.

That's a whole lotta nothing, and 8k textures aren't exactly easy for it to use! Surprisingly, it doesn't actually impact the render time too much. It certainly adds some overhead, but it's more or less a constant 40 seconds at the start of the render. A bigger problem seems to be the viewport interface. It can stall the use of the program for as much as 20 seconds whenever it decides it wants to redraw the node swatch or other such things. It's a real irritation but I think it's symptomatic of a poor approach.

I've thought about baking the shaders into a texture and just having the network for when I want to rebake, but you loose the dynamic properties of the shaders and I think it looks kind of ugly.

The center square it what a texture map comes out painted as from ZBrush. The black areas don't correspond to any polygons, but the borders can get a bit muddled which leads to the next scraps' concerns: SEAMS!