I can help you with your second question.  Enter the Material Room and select your VSSProp.  Open the pull down menu under Material and select Apply Rules. If you successfully activated your VSSProp Script and have your Python Script panel open, click on *Designer. * Add a Rule node, select other-type it in from the pulldown menu of the dialog box, hit OK  Another dialog box will appear, enter the name of the character you would like to target and hit OK.  After the node is created, select and delete the  Rule