Wow! That helps... I have the problem of not being able to use a thing unless I have some coherent mental model of how it works... doesn't have to be an accurate or correct model... just a shoe box to put it in.

"Instead of putting the data into a mysterious file that nobody understands, I used a prop to hold all the data." That is a statement that really puts a lot to rest. I had the misapprehension it was some sort of control prop I had to manipulate directly somehow. If I can tell my self it is just an expedient, a sort of memory buffer that the material room can read shaders off of that is a big help for me. Next I tell myself that the MATpose somehow put the shader data in the prop/buffer and that the script tells poser to read that data onto the figures from that prop. May not be true but it is at least a mental model I can work with.

I can handle some occult stuff such as that I don't understand the Poser core code but if I see a piece like that prop hanging out with all these dials on it instead of the data being hidden from me in some .dat file in a python sub-folder I get all stymied spinning my wheels trying to figure out what it is and what it does and what I am supposed to do to it... it provides a non render shader tree to copy shadder setting off of is something I can grasp even if I don't know the details. The only reason I can use Poser at all is that it is all based on ASCII, the mesh, the morphs, the .CR2s.

I'm one of those people who can't even use household appliances until I have established some model (accurate or not) as to the principal and mechanics of their operation... might be some sort of Low Latent Inhibition thing. I have no idea how other people can watch TV or ride in a car or fly in a train or even read a book for that matter without a lucid model of how those things are produced, what principals they work from and a rudimentary understanding of the mechanics. I always wonder what it is like for people who live in a world wear Big Macs and Mac Trucks just appear out of nowhere... no history, no origin, no conceptual basis... I can't imagine these things aside from in the context of their history and production... all the many people involved in thinking them up and making them possible.

It seems to me for those people who drive around and don't know the principals of internal combustion engines, gear systems, breaking and steering assemblies or how AGbuisness and McDonald's gets a burger to their table that they must live in a magical world... a Harry Potter world where things are summoned up as though by magic and anything is pretty much as plausible of anything else. Thank god I know how a keyboard/CPU/RAM/OS/wordprocessor/forum software/internet connection/LCD display work in principal at least or I probably couldn't write this post :)