Attached Link: http://www.pcbos.nl/3D.htm

Hi Netherworks,

you're right, P5 handles materials in a pretty involved way!

If you use P4 MAts, things will get even more complicated than usual. It took me many, many hours of hard work to find a way around this; you might like to take a look at the Tutorials page of the POSETools for a way of converting P4 into REAL P5. A new update is on it's way to deal better with especially this problem- many Users still have their old P4 Figures- myself included. Very interesting stuff though!

I was intrigued by your Firefly remark, so I checked the Firefly angle out with the Figures I used in development of the Tools- gave me a good comparison. From what I've seen, I deduce that it Firefly DOES simulate the nodes as if they were P5- but, and this won't surprise you: you won't get any extra out of this.

The only way to create Materials that make use of all the new nodes in P5, is to go into the Material Room itself.In dealing with P4 Mats, the PoseTools, like Firefly, analyse the model and then create a P5 file from the result of that study. This "making an analogy" works pretty well for about 95% of the time, except that the POSETools may sometimes decide it would be better if a "Gradient Bump" became a real P5 bump file (for instance, when a very high value is set there, which is better expressed in P5: as I'm sure you've noticed, P5 bumps are about 15 times more powerful in changing looks than the standard P4 bump implementation); and the User may not agree with the decision. But for writing math nodes and so on, your Figure or Prop must have proper P5 mat. If it does have one, POSETools will write the real P5, and not try to figure one out.

By the way, I think it's a pretty cool that your MAT Pose Edit provides a batch conversion, now WHY didn't I think of that?:-) Good on ye mate!

Cheers,

Paul Christiaan