Quote - > Quote - I have already tried Matmatic in Poser 7 on V3 without any modification to the script at all.  It runs fine, at least, with those settings. 

I suppose that it would have been smarter of me to recreate the conditions - installing Poser 6, installing V3, etc - and then running stuff just to get a feel for how it all works before trying to do mods and using non-supported figures. This I will do. I think I have enough room on my drive for that - I'll just install the bare-minimum Poser 6 with only V3 in the runtime.

Quote - The concept of VSS came in after Matmatic and has been under development for quite some time.  If you want to do node manipulation then VSS is the way to go until the Pro version is released.

So, from what you are telling me, VSS can be used as a shader development tool of the sort I've outlined above. What I think I'm reading here - correct me if I'm wrong - is that VSS is the more polished, task-focused skin-shader tool, where Matmatic is more of a lets-have-a-play-with-making-shaders-by-writing-code sort of tool... I think.

Quote - The problem with the Basic Ultra Shader for Matmatic is that it lacks the necessary nodes to control AO, texture shades, etc.  For the stark realism you see in Face_Off's product, you will see in VSS.  Reading closely the posts, if you were inclined to, you could strip out the node arrangement from Face_Off and apply it in VSS.

 
I am studying the product of applying face_off's Realism Kit (ignoring Occlusion Master, since that is by definition going to be highly light-specific) but the challenge is to determine which nodes are the most generic and hence applicable for my purposes.

Yikes!!! This thread has gone way way off course. Let me see if I can straighten it out.

1.) Matmatic is character specific.   NO matmatic can be used on ANY object (yes including characters like V3, V4, M3, and any other character)

2.) Poser 6 and 7 versions are different only because Poser 7 uses a slightly different Python language.

3.) VSS is a shader development tool and more powerful than matmatic. NO again. VSS is used to propagate any shader including those created by Matmatic over an object or objects. VSS DOES NOT make shaders.

Face-offs Occlusion master is specific to a scene light like His realism kit is. NO. Occlusion master simply allows for AO to be applied to part or all of any object and has a couple of adjustments built in.

4.) you are hung up on creating a character collection. Try down-loading the Vargas shader for Matmatic, it is very simple and a good place to start with Matmatic for characters.

I hope this clears things up a bit.

Don