Quote - ok, i think, again, you're conflating stuff. maybe you should be more explicit about what you want to do.  the whole point of VSS is to do what collections do.  i don't believe bagginsbill has explicitly said, "don't use collections," but it does seem obvious.  if you look in the VSS thread, towards the end somewhere i think he mentions Matmatic support.

in case you aren't aware, because i think many aren't, VSS does much more than work with skin.  it comes with a default skin shader, but that's just one possible use.  at one point bagginsbill was talking about selling it with tons of other default shaders.

so, once again, Matmatic is optimized for making a single material.  like a skin shader, a wood shader, a patterned glass shader, etc.  VSS is made to manage materials.  if you are managing materials with Matmatic, you are trying to get it to do something it wasn't optimized for,  and that VSS was optimized for.

no, Matmatic is not the equivalent of face_off's realism kits.  neither is VSS.  face_off's realism kits are something like VSS, but more like Parmatic.  and really, they're all just different.  but, either way, just to say, while i believe bagginsbill said you could distribute materials made with VSS, Matmatic and Parmatic, i do not believe he said you could distribute tools based on those utilities.  and face_off's kits are tools, not shaders.

Thank you for your clarification. I am not up on the latest on skin shaders - there is a gif file on that stickied thread that prevents me from accessing it as it freezes my browser up solid. What I did do was follow the threads on RuntimeDNA: one discussed setting up a simple skin shader using Matmatic and the other discussed the similarities and differences between what face_off created and what BagginsBill has accomplished.

My objective is to create a variety of content and to experiment with shaders and nodes. The impression I got was that Matmatic would allow me to manage nodes programmatically. That appealed to me. In none of the threads that I read was there any mention of VSS, so I stand not corrected but finally informed.

Fine. I still want to have a play with Matmatic. Is that a bad thing? I will use VSS - it comes strongly recommended - but would really like to sort out why I'm getting a syntax error in my Collection class. I followed the example in the docs. Is there a problem with the program itself? Is that why everyone is trying to dissuade me from creating Collection classes instead of having VSS manage it?

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