Quote - cobaltdream says: AprilYSH works with D|S a lot, but is quite mistaken about Shader Mixer.  it's equivalent to the Material Room, not Matmatic.  it isn't a way to script materials so that you don't have to worry about making nodes at all.  in Matmatic, the compiler decides how many nodes you actually need to implement a statement like Blend(color1, color2, mask).  that's not at all the same thing as having to work with nodes directly.  the whole point of Matmatic is abstracting to expressions and not needing a GUI.  not to mention, ShaderMixer doesn't have built-in input multiplication.  it has input override.  so any nodes you'd generate from something like a Matmatic script need to be implemented very differently. 

lol ok I'll wear that but quibble that it could be more because I've not used matmatic... but also I'm sure I did not equate Shader Mixer to the Poser material room because in mixer you can redefine the attributes (nodes?) that appear in the main shader (and hence what the end user has to input in the surface tab ui) ... while in Poser you have to start with the predefined "PoserSurface". So it's still not quite the same in the context I was thinking,  and I'm not sure what else to equate it to.  Any suggestions? :)

On a separate note, Shader Mixer is still marked BETA and only a few people have poked sticks at it yet.  Personally I'm staying away from it in favour of reading up on RSL (if and when I have time) because beta means it could change drastically. Investing much effort in understanding its "bricks" could be a huge waste of time.  :/

Quote - cobaltdream says: but that's the thing.  the people who really understand stuff like this and build shaders mathematically sell things like HSS and PWSurface.  they don't say: "hey, this is how i made SSS work.  here you go for free."  i'm not saying they should do that, but even face_off wrote a free tutorial on how his Real Skin Shader was built before he sold it.  and all of the other Poser skin shader people i know of  posted their experiments here in the forums.  so yeah, the Poser community tends to be a little more generous, which happens when people don't need to pay more to become experts. 

probably true... just wanted to note that Arthur Heinz did have a huge long thread on his shader(s) where he shared his info and compiled copies for free long before he sold it :) 

Quote - cobaltdream says: not to say that there aren't nice and generous D|S users, but it's just harder and more expensive to get at in-depth D|S knowledge than it is to get at Poser knowledge.  and as a result, a lot of very accomplished D|S users don't actually have in-depth knowledge or understanding, so they can't share it even if they wanted to.

never thought about it before but your observations sound about right...

(well now I wish this heretofore reasonable discussion topic was in its own thread lol :) )

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