Hi people. Great stuff here. Many good replies. I'm going to chime in just to confirm some stuff I liked. Sorry if I don't go back and credit each original poster.

A zone for lips to help Daz users - makes sense. Even more sense, however, is the idea that the lip zone should actually be more than the lip, so the lip/skin boundary is not on the zone boundary. Brilliant - that would solve all the problems with hard edges. But I think that the lip zone gets mis-used by a lot of people so that they can just crank up the glossy on that zone and they just don't care about the transition.

In reality - one zone or two - just doesn't matter to me anymore I guess. With VSS, I can handle a two-zone face just as easily as a one-zone face. Makes no difference anymore.

As for combinations of lip color and other makeup colors, I hear what you're saying, but I still don't need combinations of color maps for that, regardless of how many face zones there are. Instead, I use overlays and blend them. In my opinion, there is no reason to have lipstick or eyeshadow on your skin maps AT ALL. Even if you have only one zone for the whole figure, if you have a mask (similar to a transmap) to drive a Blender node, you can overlay other color maps on any sub-section of the figure (lips, iris, nipples) . I understand you can't do that in DS, so additional zones help there, but those additional zones are only going to be effective if the zone boundary exceeds the interesting subset boundary, so that the skin can blend smoothly. If you want, for example, to swap out a different nipple color, but the nipple zone does not extend out into clear skin, then you've wasted your time with creating that zone.

On the subject of cornea, I have demonstrated several times that a flat iris and a refracting cornea is very effective. I don't have the renders handy, but I did V3 eyes that way years ago and they were stunning. If you only render frontal portraits, you don't care, but from other angles it is a very big difference.

I do not like the eye surface thing. First of all, the claim that it is easier to set up the shine across the whole eye doesn't hold water for me, because I need different characteristics. The sclera is bumpy, while the cornea is absolutely smooth. So i need bump mapping on one but not the other. This is very easy to do when they are different material zones. Second, I want to use refraction on the cornea. If the cornea is combined with the super-thin layer of water of the sclera, I sometimes get problems because Poser doesn't like to do refraction on super thin layers. And this forces refraction to be involved for the entire eye, which is computationally expensive. It's better to limit the refraction to the cornea.

For free VSS, I have not given you guys the 100% realistic eyes yet, so you're not seeing the problems I'm talking about. In order to do 100% realism with that eye surface thing, I have to have a custom mask based on the UV of the character to drive the differences between the cornea and the wet layer on the sclera.

Having said that, the reality is that with Poser shaders, i can make it do the right thing no matter which way you go with zones and surfaces, as long as everything is UV mapped, including the cornea area.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)