Wow, thank you, Bagginsbill!

First off, congratulations on your tan :D - good ON ya... hope you had a wonderfully relaxing time down there in the Dominican Republic - 'course, for me, it's up there (being in Oz). I imagine the food is similar to what might get in New Orleans: spicy, rich, YUM! Lots of fresh fruits, too...

To put it mildly, I'm totally obsessed with your brilliant tools. What got me realizing that something other than the skin texture maps we needed to make decent, somewhat believable skin renders was pulling up those characters that did render well in the Material Room and having a sticky-beak at what else was being done. When I got into face_off's stuff, I fully realized that nodes and shaders were the key to accomplishing this.

However, from reading the node-cult thread on RuntimeDNA, it became clear that creating a set of nodes that would work in most lighting situations was going to be a lot more difficult than it first appeared. I actually even studied the shaders that load with V4 HiRes to see what they did, and then, have been spending a lot more time at CastlePoser to get my head around what each of the nodes do... that's really a key component in all this.

Your description just now pretty much summarizes my understanding of what your tools do. I was focusing on Matmatic because I wanted to be able to make a change in one node - make it programmatically - and have that change be reflected across the range of that particular body part type for a quick render. I find Python a pretty straight-forward language to code in, and am picking it up pretty quickly. Besides, there's heaps of examples out there on writing shader scripts, and hey, examples was how I learned VB, FoxPro and php.

Your point about how different body parts - like eyes, scalp, facial skin, eyebrows and lips - all belonging to the same essential body part, yet each requiring different handling is a good one... but then, I'm happy to pass parameters, I have no issue with writing a collection that could manage that, although it would be a complex one, because certain nodes would NOT be addressed because of a parameter and yet others WOULD, and how to parse it all out - maybe a whole series of distinct functions doing just one node, detects whether it exists and manipulates based on a passed parm... not sure yet how I would do it. Actually, the collection would merely be a "set up" and the manipulation in the shader script would then take stock of the distinctiveness of each body part as well as what group it belongs to, depending on what node is being managed.

Sheesh. I'm not very good at explaining myself. It almost sounds like spaghetti code, but it wouldn't be... it would be very part-specific, node-specific.

Right.

So, what I have done is what I should have done at the outset: load your favourite working environment (Poser 6)... check... use your favourite model (well, not favourite maybe, but a lot of the examples are based on her) V3... check... installed Matmatic and Parmatic - going to install VSS next. I realize that Parmatic wasn't the next logical step, but I was curious to see how it worked. Got a bunch of errors initially and since then, it does nothing, so I stuffed things up somewhere, somehow - that is just so me to do that... :/

I will learn these tools, Bill, and thank you SO much for providing them. When you finally feel they are ready for market, know that I will be your first avid customer!

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

Wir sind gewohnt, daß die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen
[it is clear that humans have contempt for that which they do not understand] 

Metaphor of Chooks