Thanks Mark.

The Poser Manual discusses hooking up textureMaps. That's it in terms of how nodes are actually used. The rest of the manual is a dictionary of the nodes... says NOTHING about to plug them into each other or how they affect each other.

I've been to the sites you mentioned... the pages are old, with a lot of dead links or bogus links. It's all very higgledy-piggledy, disorganized, unstructured. Frustrating. Most of Mystic Nights points to Castle Poser anyway (or to dead sites on Smith Micro which is useless).

Bagginsbill is a genius in the nodes world, but quite frankly, much of what he says is so completely out of my reach I'm left more confused than before. I've been to the Nodes Cult forum of RuntimeDNA, starting with the earliest threads, hoping to get my head around the subject from some sort of starting point. Seems to me from reading the discussion that a lot of ground had already been covered... they others in the discussion are all quite knowledgeable about the basics of node construction.

I've heard it before: you have to try them yourself to see how they're used. That's what I'm hoping to either develop or find in process of development: an organized approach that those of the meanest intelligence (like me, for instance) can understand. This is where the gap is. We have the dictionary on nodes: what they do. We have tons of examples on what people have done with them.

At the risk of addressing the same issue - which was NOT dealt with to my satisfaction - that Acadia brought up in another thread: how did Bill know to plug in such-and-such a node to achieve such-and-such a result. I'm sorry, but using a gastronomical example doesn't wash: chefs go to chef's school. They learn from the "experimentation" of others. If it weren't so - if each chef had to do his or her own "experimentation" - fine dining would be rarer than hen's teeth.

Look at Poserdom. How many truly use the material room? Why isn't it used more? The group I frequent - and there are *many such groups - shudder and quail at the thought of entering that room. Why? Because they aren't maths wizards, couldn't put together the quadratic equation if their life depended on it, but then, I drive a car and don't understand the physics of the internal combustion engine, either.

This should work, folks!

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