Quote - On the subject of Poser material analysis, I already have a program that does that. VSS. VSS let's you start with somebody else's shaders, of whatever complexity, that are already loaded on your figure. It examines the shader, figures out what the maps are for, and then uses them to make new shaders. So the problem of decoding how to use the texture set is one I've already solved.

I haven't looked at LuxRender's material system yet in any detail, but if I recall from reading about it a few weeks ago, it's all based on a pre-defined set of basic shaders. For example, the architectural glass is similar to my Fresnel reflection + transparency shader. But the Fresnel reflection shader is 14 nodes, and I don't think I could write a program that recognizes that those 14 nodes are doing Fresnel reflection with an IOR of 1.4.

But I could let you mark up the shaders the way "Reality" does. I could take a guess at what the material is doing and try to pick which LuxRender shader to use, and map a lot of the parameters from Poser to LuxRender.

Any simple shader that is pretty much using a handful of lighting nodes I think would be possible to figure out automatically which material to use in Lux.

Little heuristics could be developed as well and combined to make better guesses. For example, if the specular color is the same as the diffuse color, it's a metal and should use the LuxRender metal shader.

Totally complex procedurals, like my leather shader, would be impossible to detect and understand programmatically. And any shader that is non-photoreal is also impossible.

Still, I think I could make a pretty good guess at most materials.

Love you, BB. ;o)

Laurie