Quote - As punishment for daring to post an underexposed photo of your skin shader in action, I think you should be required to stop teasing us and release VSS into the wild. :biggrin: Will the full version be released soon after the free one? Will it most likely be available here in the MP?

You're right. You know I'm a chronic perfectionist, and I keep working on it and working on it.

There are really four projects in one here, and I've muddled them together. There's free VSS itself (the Python script) and the shaders to go with it. Then there's Pro (not free) VSS, and the shaders to go with it. Technically, you don't need the shaders to use VSS, but there's a lot of explaining I have to do to teach you to "program" within the VSS system, even in the free version. I don't mean Python programming - you'll never have to do that. I mean creating and connecting my made-up nodes that control the whole process.

How does this sound: I strip out all the dangerous, unexplained stuff in VSS Free, package it with one set of figure shaders as they are and let you play with the one-click stuff?

The problems you may encounter are:

1. Nobody but me has tested the script at all. There's a small chance it malfunctions. Don't let it work on any important projects where I may screw up your work.
2. You won't have the ability to teach it which figures to modify or how to modify them. It will modify any figure it sees that looks like it has eyes, lips, skin, etc. However, it will only modify skin, teeth, etc., not clothing zones, unless they happen to have a material name that is like one of the ones I look for on human figures. Note: It only modifies what's in memory. It will never touch your files.
3. I haven't worked out all the automatic analysis - it sometimes makes mistakes trying to figure out what maps go where.
4. It may miss a zone here or there - zones with names I did not anticipate. If you run into these, let me know and I'll add the zone to the master list.
5. I really haven't done a good job of organizing the content yet. You'll just have to guess what the lighting setups do through experimentation.
6. If you want to adjust the shader parameters, you'll have to go into the material room and mess with the nodes yourself. I don't have documentation for the shaders so this may be confusing to you as there are a lot of nodes. A lot. I mean a lot. My plan is to have a simple master parameters zone where you just see parameter nodes - not the full shader. These parameters would get copied to the shader templates automatically. (It would work like Parmatic does.)

If you're willing to live with those issues, I can let you guys play with it. It will take me a few hours to get it ready.

As for the Pro version, I'm probably going to put it a RuntimeDNA. They've been very kind to me, giving me my own forum (Node Cult) and supporting my craziness for a long time. Rendo admins have been very nice to me, too, but I gotta choose someplace. Plus, Sydd (one of the RDNA owners) asked me first to put my first for-sale stuff on their site.

Just to tease you more, the Pro version will support "Effect Shaders". VSS Free only has "Template Shaders". A template is a whole shader, without image maps. An "Effect Shader" is something that gets layered on top of a shader. For example, there are effect shaders that will overlay an existing shader to do:

1. Suntan lines
2. Body hair
3. Tatoos
4. Eye shadow
5. Eye liner
6. Rouge
7. Lipstick
8. Lip liner
9. Lip gloss
10. Stockings
11. Second skin underwear
12. Nail polish
13. Freckles
14. Moles
15. Petechiae (small, minor hemorrhages caused by broken capillaries)
16. Ethnic blending (make any texture set into dark-skinned figures, without darkening hands, feet, etc.)

All of those can be stacked - you can combine several of them at once.

Many more are possible, but those will be built in. I may introduce limited capability versions of some of those to VSS Free.

Then I will produce the specialized control masks that you need for those to work on particular figures. For example, the "tan lines" mask for V4 won't work on V3 - wrong UV map layout.

And, of course, the Pro version will have a bajillion parameters.

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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)