Quote - While it's great to see some vendor response to this I believe there might be some misunderstanding as to what I have implied as to the definition of "tested". As previously mention specific D|S material presets are not expected, most Studio users simply want to know if the product will load properly and be usable. Five to ten minutes of testing tops. Just a simple loading and quick render would do the trick.

Yes, D|S is material/shader challenged. The burden of this falls on the artist and I personally don't expect every vendor to slave over more material tinkering in a different app. Only a quick test as I mentioned above to see if it will be usable then a short mention of it on the product description. Something like -

*Works in DAZ|Studio but will require some surface editing.

*or

*Will not work in DAZ|Studio due to _________________.

*I really don't think that's asking for that much more extra work for what could turn into some extra sales. For what it's worth I rarely use the D|S presets that come with DAZ sold products, most are little more than starting points but there are a few exceptions.

For the record I don't expect anyone to... ahem... artificially cripple their products nor do I think they would be crippled as it is. They might actually look pretty darn good in the right hands. Artists are more powerful than applications when they try to be.

I agree, but what is most misunderstood is that D|S is the entry level program and not the other way around. It may well be on it's way to better functionality but it's not there as of yet. For the most part, as I had said in my prior post, I see it primarily as a marketing tool at the moment. A damn good one though. Not to say that it isn't a good program nor that it will not be developed into a premiere program. ;o)

It isn't difficult to make most items compatible though. Most items not relying on extensive use of material and rendering tricks or other app specific features (shaders, procedurals, displacements, deformers, dynamic hair.. etc etc) should work in D|S without much issue. For stand alone models and other mesh items the best idea is to be sure that one has the P4 material tree as well as any Shaders for P5 and up in their files. DAZ Studio uses the P4 material tree just fine and ignores the shaders. I only wish I could include a line that turns off that darn specular light and set it to black. D|S turns it on by default...ughh. But DAZ script is in an entirely different format than Poser's, it is more like Javascript from the looks of it, and thus trying to incorporate that info in a single file to be compatible with both apps seems futile ;o)