I have a custom made addon  .....limb for M4 I am trying to run it with M4 through VSS because I don't have a proper texture for it. It is uv mapped but  I don't have any textures made for it so I was going to have VSS do it for me.

The problem is VSS puts all the nodes in the preview material and does not recognize the other Mat zone on the figure. Is there a way to either make the preview mat zone the one that gets used or make VSS recognize the other mat zone?

I figured it out myself. You  find the name of the node you want  to be used and you add it to the shader rules with the Add rule node button under the designer button.

Yep.

Hey BB.

I figured i would tell how I figured it out instead of just saying nevermind. That way if anyone else is having that problem they can see how I figured it out..... though I imagine  I could have figured it out sooner if I had read the  PDF from front to back like I should. I keep forgetting about it.

I should have an albino picture up some time today if everything goes right.

"You  find the name of the node you want  to be used and you add it to the shader rules with the Add rule node button under the designer button."

Do you mean node as in Blinn, etc? Or as in arm node or something?

He means "find the name of the material group you want to be modified" and add a Rule node for it, then connect the rule to a Copy node that names the desired template material you want to copy from.

Bagginsbill, a couple of followup questions:

1)  How do I setup a new template material so that it will use the existing image maps in my new shader tree?  (I have read the PDF on the VSS Home Page but it wasn't clear to me).  Here is the situation:  I'm working with a non-human figure (a building) and I need to replace the supplied shader tree(s) with correct shader tree(s) (for gamma correction, conservation of energy, etc - all the fun things you teach us about here).  I'm missing how to set up the image map(s) in my shader so it will take the specific ones from the existing shader.

1. Will VSS also copy constants from the poser surface node in the template to the target or does it only deal with nodes plugged into the poser surface node?  In the building I'm working with, the ambient value on all of the shaders is set to 1 (with a color of black so it's still a no-op).  I would prefer that the ambient value is 0 and the color is set to white.  If I set that up in the template shader will it copy that to the targets?

Thanks in advance.

1) 

The key is to rename the images. I made up a convention. Color Map is for your color map. Bump Map is for your bump map. Specular Map is for your specular map. Pretty simple, eh?

VSS will automatically rename these for you when you are designing a template. You just have to ask it. Connect a new Image_Map to Diffuse_Color. Then using the Python buttons, click on Designer, and then click on Auto Rename Images. VSS will see that you're using that image map as a color map and name it Color Map. Connect a new Image_Map to bump and click Auto Rename Images - it will automatically name that Bump Map. You can even do this with some intervening nodes between the Poser Surface and the particular map. But this sometimes gets confused, especially if you have the map connected to more than one thing. For example, if you connect an Image_Map to Diffuse_Color and Bump, it may make the wrong decision.

Once a map is renamed, it won't be renamed again.

1. Yes

Okay. I'm REALLY confused now!

Fantastic - many thanks.

IIRC if there is an image node for the bump map, but there is no bump map specified in the original shader, VSS would add a noise node instead of the image node, correct?  Is there a way to override that in case I don't want any bump?

I'm probably going to use Matmatic to build my templates, so the process would be: write the Matmatic code for my template using the appropriate node names, generate the material file,
create the new template, then load the material file into the template.  Seems way to easy.

When VSS sees an Image_Map node in your template, and it does not find a corresponding file to use for it in the target material, then it instead uses whatever is plugged into the Image_Map node's Background parameter.

In the skin shader I made for VSS, I plugged a Turbulence node into the Background parameter of the Bump Map - thus it supplies some bump no matter what. Whatever value you want to use as an alternative to a missing image map, just set that value in the Background. Whether it is a number or color or a whole series of nodes doesn't matter.