Material Maps

in packaging there are many production techniques that require color definitions for each process.
You do embossing for blue, hotstamping for magenta, UV printing for Yellow... etc.

my current packaging workflow to combine all of this techniques in a way that vray understands is to use B&W linear maps, for each attribute( reflection, base color and so on)

but what if we can make it in a way what manufacturers do?

Material maps are colored maps that each specific color represents a material
Basically you use materials/ scans in a "Material Mapped" MultiMaterial (your colored texture, example in the image). And you define each color that is mapped in the texture next to each material it belongs. if there's no color match, it uses a default material for all other colors.

I believe this is much more well organized and tidy workflow.