I've been looking at these 2 products in Daz, to liven up renders. Can anyone who has used them comment on their usefulness and the quality of the output, please. Thanks DigitalDreamer

If you use the material room then just the basic features of shader spider can save you a lot of time. It's also very stable and easy to use. I love it and I use it all the time now. The more advanced features have a lot of potential, especially for content creators - even more so with release of the free version so customers can use the partial shaders you make. Particles 2.3, I'm less keen on. You can certainly get good results from it but because it relies on a lot of transparency mapping the effects tend to render pretty slowly (heaps faster than using real atmosphere though - and much easier to control as well). There are a few areas where the user interface could be more powerful, especially for animation. Some of the supplied example particle systems don't work in Poser 6 (most of them work fine). I had a lot of trouble getting Particles 2.3 working, however Poseworks provides good user support and patches have been released pretty quickly. If you install the latest patches, you should be OK. The quality of the output for stills is very good, once you have the thing working and you've figured out how to use it correctly. I would have some reservations about recommending it for animation, but who knows, maybe that will be improved in future patches too. Overall, it's a good app, but before buying you need to know what you're going to use it for and how often you're going to use it and you need to be prepared to put some effort into getting it working and learning to use it properly.

Ajax Thanks for your reply. I only work with stills so from what you wrote, seems it should be good for me. Is it worth getting the full version of Shader Spider, or just the LE?

Get the full version. I think LE is just so you can use the partial shaders that other people make. To do the time saving stuff, you'll need the full thing.

... at least, I think that's how it works. Probably best to start with LE and see what it does then look at how much extra you get in the full thing.

To clarify... ShaderSpider LE only allows you to use partial shaders (FX6 files) created by ShaderSpider (full version). SS6LE has no other features. In addition to saving/loading partial shaders, ShaderSpider (full version) allows you to save cleanly formatted MAT poses for P4/PP/P5/P6, and effortlessly manipulate scores of materials at a time.