Shading system to reduce errors and speed up work.
(Shading tool written at deeproot...D.R. Shade)
When I started at deeproot Studios, they were wiring up their shading networks by hand in Maya. And while that was serviceable and the artists were doing good work, it was error prone. While the individual shaders were very similar, there were quite a few options that had to be remembered everytime or errors would arise in lighting. To make matters worse, in some cases Maya would break your shading if you jiggled the handle. For example, you have a normal map wired into surface, Maya notices that you have a three-channel texture and "helpfully" turns on the sRGB color-space (which breaks your shader). You fix it, but then any update to that node will trigger Maya to break your shader again. So you rename the node and your shader is broken. What makes this really funny is then Maya complains saying, "Hey, you have a sRGB color space on a normal map! That's broken!". Yeah, no kidding.
I wrote a shading tool that would use templated shaders as your starting place (shaders we had vetted and tidied up). It would also handle the annoying Maya issues (like the normal map thing), which kept the shaders clean and consistent. Futhermore, you could slap down a whole network with one click and it would come with sane defaults. The tool also bundled parameters we wanted to expose so that it was easier to adjust your shader settings than fumbling around through a bunch of random nodes. I also built into the tool the ability to handle shading variants as opinions over the settings setup in the "default" variant or original setup. This let us make different sets of shading for the same model which maintained consistency and was faster than starting over for each variant.
Let's talk about what I can do for you (demo reel on request).