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Finally, what is your Matmatic program, and where can I find it? It sounds most interesting.

The Poser material room is really nice for learning and experimenting. But connecting 50 or more nodes for more complex effects is a serious pain in the butt. At some point, I wanted to just write mathematical formulas. I also wanted to be able to use object-oriented programming techniques so I could make reusable shader components at a higher level than Poser gives us. I wanted to generate big piles of nodes in a loop. For example, the Poser "Brick" node sucks. It is not useful for serious work. Compare what you usually see with this the bricks at this link: Matmatic Bricks

That brick shader is 77 nodes! To build it by hand is excruciating. To make coherent changes is impossible. That's not even a big one. I have a cloth shader with over 440 nodes in it.

Thus was born Matmatic. It is a Poser Python plugin used to describe materials in specialized Python scripts, called Matmatic scripts. I have posted hundreds of these scripts.

I originally put it out as a "Beta" test. But that version was so close to perfect, I never put another one out. After Poser 7 came out, I had to issue a new one that was compiled for the newer version of Python that is in Poser 7, versus 5 and 6.

Here is a thread that sort of turned into an intro to matmatic.

Here is the original announcement

Here is the thread with the Poser 7 version that needs to be copied over the original. Get the version in post #6.

Acadia has put together a fantastic list of material room links. There are many links to matmatic scripts in there, too. Go here:

Material Room, Nodes & Shaders - Tutorials and Discussions (Bookmarks - Updated)

In addition to the matmatic stuff, she has linked many other very useful threads in there. Read it all if you want to really learn this stuff.

I also invite you to hang out at my forum - The Node Cult at RDNA. Over a period of time, I developed a "cult" of people who were annoyed at how difficult it was to find my posts among all the other Poser threads. So RDNA gave me my own forum - where we ONLY discuss shaders and nobody is allowed to complain that "this makes my head hurt"  LOL  Well they do anyway, but they still learn something.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)