I have a problem with drifting materials nodes! There are two basic difficulties. 1) When opening a material, the various nodes have mysteriously jumped 500 miles vertically on my screen, completely out of range. I have to scroll to reach them. This seems to happen irregularly and does not affect all materials. I have not discerned any consistent patterns. 2) When copying and pasting a series of nodes from one material to another, the pasted nodes often shoot off outside of the visible range of the screen. Again, I have to scroll to find them, then drag them back down into place. After this has happened to a material, things never seem to be right again. This often seems to give rise to the first problem, although not always. When it does, the problem carries over even when the material is saved to the library and loaded from there. That's probably not very clear. Sorry. :( Has anyone had similar problems? Does anyone have any suggested solutions? Perhaps there is a Python script to fix this? Pose files? Anything? This bug has risen to the top of my Poser irritations list, right up there with the Open files dialogue box which goes schizo. :)

This happens to me too - but sorry to say I have no solution for it :-

A materials .mt5 file can be edited in CR2 Editor to remove the bad positioning. This helps in situations where a "drifting" node has been saved to the library and continues to be a problem when loaded from the library. I do not know how to simplify or automate the process, so each node need to be hand edited. In the "shader tree" section of the material, each node is listed. node "poser" "PoserSurface" { name "PoserSurface" pos 10 0 showPreview 1 nodeInput "Diffuse_Color" { .... The line that needs to be edited is the "pos" line. I generally have problems with the y coordinates spazzing out, so I changed the second of the two numbers following "pos" to zero. This solves the problem but, as mentioned, requires that each node be done by hand. (Personally, I think this is the sort of thing that calls for a Python script, if Python can touch the nodes. Hinty-hint. I am dropping hints, yes. I am also prepared to whine and wheedle....)

About Python playing with the material room in Poser itself - tough luck. CL apparently forgot to create an API for the material room. About Python to fix the .mt5 files: sure, can be done, it's basically text file handling and Python can do that very well.

If we all hold our collective breaths and pray really hard, CL may have a MAT room API in P6 (or maybe P7). However, given developments by tromnek on a Python Poser file parser, and face_off's skin shaders create temporary material pose files with specific node positions, it can definitely be done. The only problem I can see is how to decide where a node should be. That's generally a user-input function done with the MAT Room GUI. I'm not even sure why saving a material to the library, clearing all nodes and reloading the material wouldn't fix node drift. Does anyone have an example of silly/invalid pos coordinates to define a rule of thumb? I'm not sure if the MAT room viewport dimensions are exposed to Python, but they should be available from one of the XML settings files Poser saves.