I am really impressed by V4. There I said it.  Her shape is softer than V3's and she renders great despite the number 4000x4000 textures. 

So I went to the material room and tried to re-create her shading networks for David, and he didn't render nearly as realistically as V4 does. With the exception of the specular map (which I'm in the process of creating), wondering if anyone knows why she looks the way she does and others don't. Thanks in advance. 

Sounds like her textures have a lot more detail in them than older figures have, better texture creation techniques now than when David was created maybe?

Texture and bump maps ought to be the only thing not transportable between figures, as far as I can see, and of course specular maps as you say.

True but using the same nodes on a different character with different textures plugged in will give different results, the default V4 textures have a higher level of detail than the default David textures, or am I being a bit dense?

Pretty sure that the effects applied by shaders are completely independent of texture resolution.  Size of polygons might have an effect, depending on the shader (e.g. if it applies a clouds map or something like that as part of how it works) but textures shouldn't, as I understand it (which may not be as well as I think).

What we need is pictures :D show us the nodes (if possible, legal) & the resulting renders please :D

Right, give me a couple hours to upload pics.

Regarding the yellow arrows, this edge blend region in V4's network is reddish but in the re-made network they're blue, even though all the values match exactly. Odd.

Check the lighting between the two situations, I suggest.  Make sure they are exactly the same.

pjz99 - I shouldv'e mentioned that the scene was developed for the V4 character, which was removed and replaced with the D3 character. All scene elements (except the characters and their original shading networks) are exactly the same.

Then I strongly suspect there is some discrepancy on one of the nodes you've set up.  I could imagine moire or some other kind of artifact, but a simple color difference that is that blatant is pretty unlikely to be the mesh's fault - particularly in your preview before it is even applied to a mesh, it's on a flat surface that is previewed exactly the same way for any surface regardless of polygon shape, size or count (I'm pretty sure anyhow).  Try saving your duplicated material and applying it to a cube or something and see if the color difference is still there.

Point taken. I never though it was a mesh problem and when I noticed the difference I thought it was strange, so I re-checked the settings to make sure they were correct. I'm pretty sure they are, although I'd be happy to run through them again.

Regarding "try saving your duplicated material", is there a way to save the entire shading network independent of the *.pz3 file? If so that'd make life alot easier.

Yes, in the materials room you can just create a category and save the material just like a pose or figure or whatever, although I guess you may have to fiddle with the dialog box to get it to be independent of the surface.  I'll look at that also.

edit:  um, duh, that would neatly solve your efforts of moving the materials settings between figures wouldn't it.

double duh, I just found out how to do it; let's see how well it works.

The material zone is embedded into the .mt5 file, I'm seeing, but I expect you could fix that. 
edit: correction, it works as is (just applied the entire SkinHip shader network to a cloth plane).

(hangs head low)

Just saved V4 mat to the library, applied it to D3 character, switched maps and indeed it looks more like its supposed to. The difference is subtle; I will apply it to the entire character,  render pre-s and post-s. Thanks for your assistance.

Very well :biggrin: Glad to help!