I feel really red faced...waiting this long to ask...when a Poser package comes with BOTH Pose Library - MAT files to apply textures and Material Library files to apply the textures... WHAT is the difference? Just what do the material library files DO that is different? 

Am I to use the Material library files for things I would render in firefly and the MAT pose library ones for Poser 4 render engine?

If both do the SAME thing then it is redundant to install both...and yes, I know some packages will come with ONLY "material library files".... so I would watch out for those...

I admit I use the Poser 4 render engine STILL most often because it renders hair and especially EYELASHES properly.... Firefly does beautifully on many skins, but then the eyelashes look clumpy.

Anyway....been wondering since poser 5, and am now using Poser 6.3 exclusively... (not getting P7 at all, and know it is a different animal itself).

Thanks for not laughing and any clarification you can give.

Lyne <------the one with the red face

Quote - Am I to use the Material library files for things I would render in firefly and the MAT pose library ones for Poser 4 render engine?

probably yes - mat.pz2 files were originally devised for poser 4. but we'd hafta see 'em to say for certain.

From P5 up, MAT poses and Material room materials essentially do the same thing, except that MAT poses are backward compatible with P4, and clutter up the incongruently named Poses folder and make people who never used Poser before v5 wonder where the heck to put them and still be able to find them when needed.

There are probably other differences I could find by hacking the files themselves, but those are the practical difference, and similarities.

Most of the time material editor files have no idea what material collections they are gonna apply to. However, most merchants use 'em to include advanced shaders while leaving the MAT pose with a basic texture.

Love it/hate it, once you have P5+, always look to the material room for texturing.

(Oh, and that's an interesting find about the eyelashes.)

Actually, Lyne, I use MAT pose files to apply my mc6 collections, also for image based textures.  A lot of users don't know how to apply mc6 collections so I set up mat pose files for them.

I sure like Saylor!  :)

Lyne

Note that not only eyelashes "like" the P4 render engine better but so do the earrings!?  I see no diff in the skin. (click to see the full versions and details...saved at gallery quality jpgs)

Sooo guess you helped me get going to test this area! :)

Thanks!

PS I did not use the "tear off" that comes with Grace in these renders...later I applied that and I really like the NON shine at the lower lid of the eye.

Lyne

Actually there can be no difference between a p5/p6 mat pz2 and a mt5 or mc6 set. Just depends on how the maker set them up really.  Generally mc6 or mt5 files have more Material room nodes and such used since they dont need to be p4 compatible, but not always.

Generally  though pz2 MAT files are for poser 4, pp and p5.  These files may or may not have advanced material shader room options.

An mt5 is a poser 5 material (or shader) you can apply it to anything and it will apply its material settings. It only works on one material at a time, and can contain both node based effects and image based effects. Some materials are for applying specific imagemaps, some for shader effects such as water or stone.

An mc6 file is a Material Collection file and you can make them with Poser6. This is a set of material settings set for specific materials (for a certain model) rather than a one shot like an mt5.  The mc6 is generally set for just one model and will change all the materials at once. Since you can make and adjust them in poser, this takes a lot of work out of making mats. Thankfully. 

You can also take any existing MATpose.pz2 and turn it into a mc6 file by changing the file suffix to mc6 and putting in in the Materials folder. It will still apply the same settings, but you wont have to chase it down in the Pose folder.  I've already corralled all my MAT pose files into the materials folder so I can actually see what I ahve in the Poser folder for the first time in ages :)

I havent tried turning an mc6 into a pz2 yet .. so I dont know what would happen if you try that.

If you buy the most excellent ShaderSpider script from Poseworks you can make all these material settings in poser at once. I've found it very helpful in setting up all the materials I need for my products wihtout all the tedious text editing and file renaming.

ps Lyne you definately want to play with the displacement and bump and specularity settings in the shader room. I had entirely too much fun setting up mermaid tails with poser6... I'd like to see what you can do with some of your great animal textures :)

Lyrra

MAT = Material
MOR = Morph
MATMOR = Material + Morph or FULL character apply
INJ and REM = Inject and Remove (Poser 5+ only)

All of these can be either PZ2 or CM2 or LT2 files where normaly:
PZ2 = Pose files
CM2 = Camera files
LT2 = Light files

but all three use the same syntax in their script language and Poser will apply the paramiters occordingly.

The MAT, MOR, Pose started when DAZ produced the first Morph Inj/Rem character and we had no where to put all those buggers in Poser 4 and someone had hacked the Pose files and we also had no where to put those buggers either. Many of us hacked them even further and began changing our MAT and MOR files into Camera files (CM2 rather then PZ2) in order to keep the depth of the folder system managable and be able to find things when we needed them.

However there where many who did not stick to calling their Pose Files 'xxxxx.pz2' and their Material files 'xxxxMAT.pz2' and their Morph inject files 'xxxxxMOR.pz2' and their Full (both texture and morph together) files 'xxxxMATMOR.pz2'; some because they just didn't know the difference and some because they thought it simply 'cool to be different'.

With P5/P6/P7 there is now the Material Room and now the extention has changed to MT5/MT6 (MT7 ??)

Therefore the best for most to understand and not confuse would be to refer to:
Material files; those that Change The Materials on an object or character, as MAT files.
Morphing files; those that effect the Morph params of a character or object as MOR files.
Pose files; those that change a character's pose position as Pose files.
Material/Morph combo files; those that change a character's morph peramiters AND apply textures as MATMOR files.
Inject and Remove files; such as DAZ uses on Vicky1,2,3 and Mike1,2,3 and SP3, etc as INJ and REM files.

But that may be too complex for many to follow so if MOR file sounds more chiek to some for files that only apply textures or MAT file sounds more 'cool' then MATMOR for files that apply a complete character....then one can just call them whatever they want and the person on the recieving end can just raise an eyebrow when they click on it and get a Totally different result then they expected and wonder "how come this person posts files for others to use when they don't know what the files are....good thing they are not a programer at 'my' company!"

Quote - You can also take any existing MATpose.pz2 and turn it into a mc6 file by changing the file suffix to mc6 and putting in in the Materials folder. It will still apply the same settings, but you wont have to chase it down in the Pose folder.  I've already corralled all my MAT pose files into the materials folder so I can actually see what I ahve in the Poser folder for the first time in ages :)

Wow, this is highly useful to know, thanks.

Can you put both mats and morphs in the material room? I noticed with DAZ's Grace for V4, the textures are in both the Material Room and the Pose library, while the morphs are in the Pose library only. Did they have to do it that way?

I would say the the mt5 files are material definitions and that mat pose files pz2 apply the material to a specific named texture on the figure.

Quote -
With P5/P6/P7 there is now the Material Room and now the extension has changed to MT5/MT6 (MT7 ??)

MT5 is a single material that (in the material room) will apply to the currently selected material zone of the currently selected figure or prop. It was introduced in Poser 5.

MC6 is a material collection that (in the material room) will apply to the currently selected figure or prop. They are set up for a specific item or figure. They were introduced in Poser 6.

Poser 7 did not add any new file types.

Mat Pose files (pz2) have some limits. Mat Poses cannot be applied to a prop unless there is a figure in the scene and in some versions the prop must be parented to the figure. MC6 files and Mat Pz2 files that are renamed to MC6 and moved to the material library, do not suffer this restriction.

There's also been some changes in how "partial" MAT poses work. P4 (at least) allowed a MAT posefile that might just change the diffuse color, without affecting the texture being applied, so it could do things like alter skintones. P5 loses the texture file. Also, a MAT pose which includes materials that are not on the target will still add those materials, and there's no easy way of getting rid of them. A P6 Material Collection in the same situation will trigger an "are you sure" query.

It isn't quite as simple as just changing the file extension though, just a couple of seconds extra work and then you are set.

A .pz2 extension file needs to have {figure} after the version number "slot", so if changing a material collection (.mc6) to a MAT pose file (.pz2) then this needs manually editing - trust me forgetting to do this means you can double click 'til your mouse falls in bits but that texture will not apply to your cloth, figure or fancy shoes.

Similarly the .mc6 file extension needs to have {materialcollection} after the version number "slot" or it brain farts on you.

Spot who bought a MAT pose generator only to discover it is so much quicker and easier to save out as an .mc6 and then convert to .pz2 for P5 users.  That is why I include both .pz2 and .mc6 in a pack, my shaders and other bits and bobs will work just fine in P5 but as it can't understand a material collection file this would mean restricting my potential audience to P6+.  Plus some users prefer the good old MAT pose file no matter what version they are working in.  In my case the information contained within the .pz2 and the .mc6 are identical.

INJ/REM poses will not work from the material room as they do not change the appearence of the texture but change the appearence of the underlying mesh.  This is why you have noticed that although the skin, eye and makeup options for a figure can be present in two folders - one set for .pz2 and one set for .pz3 - the actual character morphs are only in the pose folder.

I think that you can rearrange your material folders ... something I really need to do.
I generally rearrange my pose folder so that all the additional textures for a base outfit fall under it as sub-folders. If you just install all the textures you buy from DAZ and 'rosity, you end up with a gigantice wodge called something like "V3 Morphing Clothes", and then a bunch of cutesy named folders like "Farie Dance", or "Abilene" where you have no idea which outfit they go to, or, for that matter, which figure, and then you get the creator specific folders, such as "foonman" which contains all the pose files for all the figures that foonman has made for BAT's bondage outfits, and ....

Unfortunately for me, all this time I assumed that material files had to have an absolute position (like textures, geometries, and morphs) in order to be referenced properly, so it looks like I will be kind of busy organizing them.

Nope you can reorganise them as you want.   Sounds like your Pose folder resembles mine, glad I'm not the only one that does that.

WOW! Now I am not feeling so dumb...I am also VERY carefully studying my poser products in my temp runtimes before installing...so now I can save space, knowing what I prefer to do/work with in poser.

and yes...I LOVE displacement and assign it to things like sweaters etc....all sorts of things one can do there... now the speculairity and I do not get along so well...more often than not, THAT is in my way....l  like when I had to find out the windows in the Great Room from DAZ will NOT go transparent until you turn the spec to BLACK...was soooo shiny...and then vue picks up the settings...so again...have to be sure there is NO reflection or spec set before taking the pz3 objects out to vue... 

Anyway... THANK YOU ALL for all your information..some I knew and lots I did not.

Lyne

So I downloaded hair and it's in my poses library. It's starts with Mat. When I double click the thumbnail. No hair comes up for me to parent. Any suggestions?

If you downloaded something and it's in your Pose library, it's a MAT POSE file that needs to be applied to the appropriate figure or prop.  Since you said this is hair, look in the Figure library or the Hair library for the hair that you downloaded.  If it's a prop, you'll need to parent it to the character head.  If it's a hair figure, you'll need to conform it.  Once the hair is loaded and positioned, make sure it's selected and then go to the Pose folder and apply the MAT pose for it.

Ahhhhhhh. That's what I did wrong. I didn't get the hair. The Mat came up in the pose library and I tried to apply it to the head but didn't see the name of the hair to conform or parent to the head. So was totally lost. Thanks a bunch!

I was having some trouble in P7 with textures not looking as good with the Firefly render as they did with the P4 render engine. There was blurring. I asked in another forum and found it was the standard settings for Firefly. You can either increase the Auto setting to Final or choose Manual Settings and reduce the Minimum Shading Rate to .20. 
That solved my problem.