Thanks yea I was just under the assumption of less nodes means better, but now that you say that and I do it it's actually less nodes to do it with single mat blends since I don't have to make the color ID mask. Thanks for the help!
I don't know if this would work, but instead of feeding your composited RGB mask into Color ID mask node, you could just feed the raw channel, Red, Blue, Green as grey scale into the mask input of a blend node... maybe it'll work more consistently? Also tere would be no need to composite the colors together.
Unfortunately I believe I need the color ID specifically for the multi material blend node that I am using to get the layering effect without fudging about with height masks. Or do you mean something different? Right now I basically have 3 masks that are variations of a mask so that they are within each other and then I am…