Houdini 20 new texture mask paint node limitations?

[Drainzo]

After watching the Houdini 20 new features keynote video I was excited for the new texture mask paint node since it has the potential to avoid having to subdivide meshes just for the sake of attribute paint resolution. In the keynote I believe it is mentioned that they used this on the eagle feather grooming demo piece but I'm not seeing it in any of those texture nodes there after downloading the asset from the content library. I was hoping to see how they used it in that example.

My question is, once I have painted in that node and it now exists as 2d volume data, what good is it down the pipe other than to write it out as suggested in the help doc? One of the many strengths of the attribute paint method is that you can manipulate, combine, remap, blur etc  that data after it is created. When its 2d volume data I'm theoretically able to blur it with "heightfield blur" or toss it into a "heightfield combine layers" but it is done in uv space and there for seems to be less useful be used directly to plug into a groom density mask or to drive a lerp in a wrangle etc.

TLDR, Im not seeing the usage for this node other than to save to disk as a texture and read back in. 

Thanks!

-Matt

Edited November 29, 2023 by Drainzo