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1. How to think about Overpaint

If you are new to texturing or want to get mental model, OP was build on, think of one material as a ship.

  • On the deck stand stacks of containers. A stack is a folder. Stacks can stand inside other stacks: a folder can hold folders. (rigid Frame structure)
  • Each container is a layer. (another rigid Frame structure)
  • Inside every container sit palettes. A palette is a sublayer, and as you know when you ship anything - a palette can hold anything: a colour, an image, a hand-painted mask, a procedural pattern, a filter, a reference to another palette, AND even your own Blender nodes.

The rule that makes the whole ship work: folders and layers are structural, palettes carry the cargo. Folders and layers decide where stuff sits and how it blends. The actual nodes live in sublayers (the frames inside the OP group in Blender's Shader Editor).

Two more pieces to complete it:

  • Channels are the kinds of cargo. Colour, Roughness, Metalness, Normal, Ambient Occlusion, Bump, Height, Emission, the twelve Principled BSDF channels (Opacity, Coat, Sheen, Transmission and the rest, chapter 6), plus any channel you define yourself (yes, you can do that!). A palette (sublayer) declares which channels it touches.
  • Buses are what a palette does. A palette on the image bus paints cargo into channels. A palette on the mask bus decides where the cargo of its container shows. A Paint sublayer under a Colour sublayer is the classic pair: the colour is the cargo, the paint is the stencil.

The ship also has a "crane" and a "port". The Cascade cache is the crane: it pre-packs finished containers into GPU textures so the viewport stays fast. The exporter is the port: it bakes the whole ship into texture files, packed the way your engine wants them.

What analogy means in workflow:

  • for cache – you never "flatten" anything to keep working. Palettes stay editable. Flattening into a layer is an explicit act, and it can be released again.
  • Reordering a container reorders its cargo, and Overpaint rewires the masks and channels for you.
  • A new palette kind, whether shipped with Overpaint, dropped in from a library, or built from your own nodes, sits in the same container system and gets the same compositing, caching, baking and export treatment.

In more plain terms: edit sublayers when you want your own node stuff. Leave the Folder and Layer structure alone. Fill (MASK bus) and Color (IMAGE bus) are the easiest places to start, they have the least structural nodes. Your chain goes into the mixing node's input B (custom setups are still something we will build on, not every case is fully tested).