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Showing Shading Rig on a test sphere is all fine and well, but it's obviously not a recreation of a production character. For this part of the docs, I'm going to use this bust, which already has a complex material with textures:

My goal here is to integrate a shading rig on this bust without breaking the existing materials and show real production techniques.

Adding a Shading Rig to an Existing Material

When you have a complex material, you can still add a shading rig to it. You just have to add the neccesary nodes from the Shading Rig to your existing material.

Click Set Up Shading Rig on Object like you normally would.

When you Set Up Shading Rig on Object, you will have a new material slot added and a new material set to it: Your existing material(s) will be untouched. It is necessary to Set Up Shading Rig on Object, but you don't need to use this material. Let's get back to our existing material. Remove the slot and the material ShadingRigBase_00x. We're going to recreate the crucial elements of this material on our existing material.

The Shadin Rig looks for ShadingRig_Entry and ShadingRig_Ramp nodes. ShadingRig_Entry is the diffuse, glossy, or otherwise pre-existing shading, converted to RGB. On your materials, this will likely mean renaming your Shader to RGB node to ShadingRig_Entry. Note that you must actually rename the node, not just change the label!

In my case, I have a DiffuseToRGB shader group that outputs diffuse lighting as RGB, so I'm going to rename this node. You can change the name of a node in the Shader Editor sidebar:

Next, I'll add a color ramp before the final, hard (constant) color ramp and name it ShadingRig_Ramp. Now we have this:

At this point, there should not be any nodes between ShaderRig_Entry and ShadingRig_Ramp.

You are now ready to start using this material. Let's switch our Material in the Settings: And add an Effect: When we Add Effect to Material, we will have a shading rig that works with our existing material. I've added three edits as an example:

To do this, put a Math node set to Add (with second input 0) between ShadingRigEffect_SR_Effect_Bust_003 and all of its outputs. It's much easier to do this if you add a reroute, as I've done. Then you can toggle clamping as desired. Compare clamping on: Versus clamping off:

Isolating an Effect

Sometimes, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly where an Effect is, especially on a complex mesh. Here, I am using the Blender realistic female basemesh as an example. I have an Effect, but I'm not sure it's doing what I want:

To preview just an Effect without everything else going on, find the ShadingRigEffect_SR_Effect_* node- in my case, ShadingRigEffect_SR_Effect_BlenderBasemesh_001 and Preview it by Ctrl + Shift + Left Click: I want to add some shading to the arm around the elbow. I'm going to do this with careful manipulation of the Effect, including scale, location, and rotation. To get the shader back how it should be, find your ramps and connect the final ramp back to the Material Output:

Now my arm looks great, but the legs have undesired shading from the Effect. Effects affect the entire object, so you will generally need to split your object up into multiple materials. Here, I've separated the section I want this Effect to affect:

I'm now going to modify both materials so they look identical. By giving my new material the required nodes, I can add Effects to this material as well. I'm going to copy four nodes from the other material:

Compare: With:

I know this way is not ideal, but until Blender fixes this particular issue, this is the best way to work with the Shading Rig.