Quote - > Quote - Understanding that BB is working on the Poser materials conversion aspect, I am curious if there is / will be a way to utilize the Lux Materials Database of presets from HERE, ? or is the intent to mimic what these shaders do in "higher end" (read more costly) packages.

That is among my plans. The LBM format is something the LuxBlender export utility created. It's not part of LuxRender, per se. Since it has no documentation, I'll have to read the LuxBlender code to understand what the LBM files say. But I will do that.

It would be a shame if we could not use the LBM files produced by others, so I really want to support them.  That is not the only format I plan to support.

We have Poser mt5 files and of course you just load them into Poser. To the extent that I can auto-convert these to Lux materials, I will.

We will also have the ability to define materials as luxmatic scripts. Luxmatic scripts are a much more powerful way of describing materials and the parameters that go with them. Luxmatic is a variant of matmatic, and it has long been my plan to make a GUI for matmatic. Now is the time. Coming out of this project will be a GUI for luxmatic and matmatic material definition and loading.

My Lux exporter GUI is still an infant, but my plan is to incorporate the ability to select a material or a group of materials and assign a shader, substituting the textures and colors already on those materials. This is what VSS does already, but without a nice GUI. Since this exporter needs to exactly what VSS does, I guess this means that VSS will finally get a GUI.

Between VSS, matmatic, and luxmatic, we'll have a very powerful (and scriptable!) material management system both for Poser itself as well as any exporter.

Thank you for this explanation BB :)

I have only dabbled with matmatic and VSS, but I do realize the power behind these. 

This again, is SO VERY exciting,  
(sort of like I remember being Christmas when I was about 7 years old :))