I've found this trick which is quite a good way round the irritating way in which Vue automatically merges material zones whenever you copy and paste a material. Suppose you start with three material zones, Mat1, Mat2 and Mat3. You change the material in Mat1 to something complex. You want to copy this to Mat2 and Mat3, but without collapsing them. You can do it like this. 1) Edit the material to be copied and make it mixed. The original material is now Material 1 within the mixed material, and you have Material 2 which is blank grey. 2) Adjust the slider so that the overall material is 100% Material 1. It now looks the same as it did when it was a simple material. 3) Do "copy material" on Material 1 within the editor. 4) Close the material editor and do "paste material" on Mat2. Voila! The two material zones now look identical but have not collapsed, because the version in Mat1 is mixed and the other is not. 5) However, if you try pasting on Mat3, Mat2 and Mat3 will collapse; so - 6) You will notice that both Mat1 and Mat2 are now called Mat1 (because Vue doesn't know the difference between a material zone and a material). Do "edit material" on what was Mat2 and just change the name back to Mat2, no more. 7) Now you can paste the material to Mat3. Better edit this one also to change the name back to Mat3. 8) Objective achieved! It would be easier all round if Vue understood the difference between a material zone and a material, or at least had an option "never collapse materials".

Nice :) Another trick along the same line : - save Mat 1 - edit Mat 2 - load Mat 1 and rename back to Mat 2 This should achieve the same effect. Mat 1 and Mat 2 are identical but the areas are preserved.

What i normally do is simply this - create cube outside the camera, apply the material i want to keep to that, rework the other and have the "original" still. But maybe i misunderstand the zone issue here.

I will try to explain the zones issue. Say you have a poser figure with zones or areas for hands and arms. If you edit the material for the hands and simply copy/paste oto the arms both arms and hands will have the same material applied but you will lose the areas. You will not be able ot edit only the hands after a simple copy/paste. If you want to give the same material to both areas, and still preserve them afterwards, you have to use the workaround mentionned above.

I think i understood that - butr isn't the best workaround for that issue to not click on the collapse thing simply while importing?

No - even if you do not select 'collapse identical materials' while importing, you can still lose material areas by copy/pasting materials later on. The check box when importing simplifies a lot of work if you know ahead of time that you will not need separate areas for body parts for example. But it does not help if you know you might want to customize body parts.

Ok, got the point now - but it is something you do manually by accident not something Vue does by misinterpretating. I think i still do not completely understand the problem. There are many ways to delete elements or materials - in my eyes. But i am a stupid guy who does not work too much manually on Poser materials, that is true!

It's not something you do manually by accident. The problem is that Vue conflates two concepts: the material zone (part of a mesh that uses certain visual characteristics) and the material (what those characteristics are). Thus if you have a material zone ("necklace") and you want to load a set of parameters that make this silver, and you load the silver material from the stock Vue materials, Vue now renames the ZONE "silver". But silver is the name of the MATERIAL. Whether you use this workaround or some other workaround, you shouldn't need a workaround at all. This problem does not occur in other similar applications.