Been having a play with nodes on their own, walking through the Castle Poser tutes, slowly getting the idea that the maths involved in creating even the most basic shader trees is well and truly beyond me, and was ready to give up on the whole notion of character creation - because I'm a perfectionist, and am not going to put Charlotte out on the street is less than something impressive for skin! On the way to Renderosity to do a bit of retail therapy, I thought I'd have a go with VSS.

There is no other word that would describe my emotions than stunned. Perhaps speechless might fit. Picking jaw off ground is imagery that would certainly apply.

Had a peek in the material room for ... say, lips... and that emotion deeped.

Okay, I will have a go at understanding these nodes, but in the blummin' meantime, sheesh, how does one improve upon perfection?? Only question I have for Mr Baggins is: (and I ask this most humbly) when do you think you might have the Pro version ready? I'm already saving up for it.

This completely revolutionizes Poser. Completely. What we can do now with this tool totally blows everything we did in the past out of the water and drops it on another, vastly inferior and inhospitable planet. And I have this sneaking suspicion we're just getting started.

I remember when FoxPro was still owned by Fox Software... Dave Fulton (the company pres) used to express his amazement at what FoxPro developers were able to create using what was essentially a database management tool superset of xBase. What BagginsBill is able to do in Poser and Python boggles the mind in much the same way.

And did I hear something about a browser-based app?

The VSS is truly amazing!  I have been playing with this on a non-humanoid creature (Nybras) and have found it to great enhance the model.

VSS is an excellent tool for sure but in my mind we need a people friendly version of Matmatic. Without the shaders to begin with VSS isn't of much help.

Don

Ahhh - more VSS cultists. ;-)

You mentioned the lip shader, but funny thing is the lips are the same as the rest of the skin. I didn't bother putting in a special lip shader - yet. Right now, you're only getting the shader that looks like the upper-left lips here:

The others are the results of using a specialized lip shader - they're all the same, just using different settings. But I haven't given out this shader yet. This is Pro stuff.

When will Pro be available? I really don't know - not until I finish VSS free, which I've been working on very slowly lately because my real job is so demanding.

Yes, I'm working on a browser-based UI for VSS and for matmatic. That should solve the need for the "people friendly" version, and also directly integrate the two programs.

Now were talkin. People friendly AND a single package containing both. Now thats a solution. Now I'm really excited.

Don

I am excited as well. Please be assured there's no pressure - I'm keen, but I also realize that the day-to-day comes first. You have already given us some incredible tools to learn and use, and do so I will. Thank you for them, BB, and for the wealth of information you've shared on the boards on all this!

I'm an artist and a nurse and was always a bit poor at maths - the maths we need for nursing is pretty straight-forward stuff, based on the metric system. Whilst I've managed to learn programming  to the point that Python isn't overwhelmingly intimidating, studying your shader tree and trying to decipher the maths is... but then, I'm obstinate. I will get this! Head-down, bump up.