Soooo... I went to make a path, starting with a painted shader. tried to invertely mask the grass populations with it to they wouldn't be all over it and nothing would change? Tried to mask a fake stones layer to it as well, and notta... nothing. It acted like the layer had no constraints at all. Is there some reason it would do this? I had the painted shader under the base colors layer, made sure it was plugged into the node network and everything. I've used this set up before, but there must be something I missed. Ended up getting frustrated and moving on for the time being lol.