The thing is, I was told the "if" are bad in shaders because it pre-calcualates each branch and then applies the if-gate logic (or something like that if I understood it correctly).

So if I have, lets say, 50 materials (BMAPS & texture_sampler calls) nested in "ifs" it will actually do 50 texture samples and then apply the if logic to see what brach it goes to? (I repeat, thats only if I understood it correctly)

But if I just blend them depending on the skill value, that will still be 50 texture samples + 50 extra lerps/blends. So I'm not sure that will be faster or slower. There has got to be some better, faster, or more effiencient way to do this? Some evil formula that eludes me, wierd saturate trick thing or... I don't know... I'm lost... Need some advice on this.