I've noticed that most commercial content uses MAT poses rather than Material Room materials to apply materials to Poser objects. (Wow, could I have used the word "material" any more times in that sentence ?! ) Is there a particular reason why? I personally prefer Material Room materials, for no real reason, and I was just wondering if there's a compatibility issue or something similar that I'm not aware of.

It is an old hold over from previous versions, but that is now changing.  More users are rethinking that ideal and are gravitating towards Material Room generated texturing as the better alternative.

Ah, I see. I started my Poser use with (and continue to use) Poser 7, so I wasn't aware of that. Thanks!

Another thought, does it make a difference to anyone if an item of content uses MAT poses or Material Room materials? I personally don't really care one way or the other and I'm curious to know if there's a widespread preference.

I am considering that if I do release another character package I am going to go with Material presets only and not do MAT poses anymore. They are a hassle to make usually needing an outside app, however Material Collections can be done within Poser itself. I still would have to make attractive thumbnails for the Material Collections, but it would cut down on some of the process time.

Quote - It is an old hold over from previous versions, but that is now changing.  More users are rethinking that ideal and are gravitating towards Material Room generated texturing as the better alternative.

Interesting, I started with P6 and never even knew about using materials in the material room till I got P7 and stumbled on a post about using them. I figured it was the other way around , that MAT poses were the norm and that materials were older since that made more sense to me. I prefer the MAT poses myself.

Funny, I remember getting a texture set for Miki from RDNA awhile back and since I saw no MAT poses, I couldn't figure out how to add them, even after contacting the vendor. A few months later I discovered them, LOL.

I still prefer MAT poses, for me the work flow is easier not shifting rooms, but I'm lazy...LOL.

Poser 8 - no shifting rooms required, unless you want to save materials, but then you can't save MAT poses from the pose room directly either :)

I guess if I ever discover anything this cool again, I'll patent it, and then when it becomes as overused/outdated as MAT poses currently are, I'll raise the royalty fee :P

I may be wrong but I believe that MAT pose files will work in Daz Studio and Carrara as well as all versions of Poser. The newer collection format can be easily modified in a text editor or using a utility - but it is an extra step - to make them compatible with other applications. 

Material collections have the advantage of telling you when you try to apply a completely wrong material. You're asked if you want to add additional material zones or not (you usually don't want to).  It's usually sufficient to change the extension from pz2 to mc6 to gain that advantage (at least in Poser 8).
Oh, and material collections also work if there's no figure in the scene.

In addition, material collections will work on props.  MATPose files will not unless the prop is parented to a character.

I prefer the Material room and I haven't made MAT poses for any of the things I've made for quite a long while now ;o). I think soon one day you'll see a drop in new products that no longer even have MAT Poses anymore.

Laurie

I package MAT poses for my products because they are easy to use because you don't have to change your room, and also can put them with DS files and people click the same icon and apply.

Materials are valued by advanced users, I know. In my last product we also gave the materials included so people can turn any object into that, but I usually just give Mat poses because they are easy for everyone.

Quote - Ah, I see. I started my Poser use with (and continue to use) Poser 7, so I wasn't aware of that. Thanks!

Another thought, does it make a difference to anyone if an item of content uses MAT poses or Material Room materials? I personally don't really care one way or the other and I'm curious to know if there's a widespread preference.

If you are happy to limit your market to poser users, then that may work.  I suspect that there are many poser users who still prefer the simplicity of MAT poses.  If, however, you would also like DAZ and Carrara users to purchase your product(s), then mat poses are the way to go.  As a Carrara user, I still have to tweak many shaders as they don't convert well, however, at least the mat pose throws them on so I can then work on them.  Material Room Materials are relatively useless to all but poser users.

Klebnor

personally as a vendor I took a good long look at what to support.

lets face it. you can support the following - poser 5,6,7,8,Pro,2010, Daz studio 2, 3, pro, bryce, carrara.......and so on.

or you can be practical.

personally I support poser 7,8/pros. and thats IT. I don't have infinate hours in the day to support every combination of software out there.

and if you don't buy...well personally I count sales, not potential sales. sales fill my bank balance. potential sales don't. so...

What bugs me (and always has) about MAT poses are this:

They clog up my Pose folders. I have to root thru literally hundreds of folders to actually find a POSE. Some of those folders have no less than !!!!!! in front of the folder name because some doofus decided their folder should be at the top of the list. It's gotten nothing but more frustrating over the years. At least with materials, they can be placed in nice, neat folders and not interfere with anything else because the only thing in the materials folder are - oddly enough - materials ;o). I don't need to go on a scavenger hunt in the materials folder to find a prop for instance...lol. If i want to find a pose, I want to go to the pose folder and find one, not fish through a million and one MAT and MOR stuff. And no, I don't like injections being in there either, but at least for those, there's not an alternative yet. Let's hope SM figures that out soon in the next version of Poser...lol.

Laurie

When I buy "clothing", before I even bring up Poser, I usually drag the cr2s into a clothing/ either lingerie or outfits folder... same for MATs - oh, and I re-label those annoying !!!!!!!MyCrashHotMAT folders to NameOfVendor- ClothingItem so I bloody-well find it when I bring up Poser, since no one seems to follow any sort of naming conventions except ego-fueled ones. Only takes an extra minute to do, and saves you heaps of frustration and time.

Then comes the labour-intensive bit: bringing up the clothing on a figure, checking out existing morphs (do they fit to Charlotte? she's a bit of a weird one, with real-girl hips and a real-girl tummy) so if the clothing doesn't work right, out comes MorCloth, and THEN comes the fun side of things... mucking around with the shader. Which DOES end up being saved in the mat library, because invariably I'll end up reverse-engineering the existing shader in matmatic and regenerating mat files.

Rendering? Who the heck has time for that? :biggrin:

 I prefere MATs. Because they are simple to use. What I don˚t like with MATs ist the overboarding use of reflections (mainly with eyes), shader nodes and all that stuff that makes everything look like sweat and Glitter. It takes up to 20 Minutes to go through all the materials and delete these things. I would prefere, if there woult be a different MAT for those who like reflections and sweat. 

Like some folks, I go poke around the POSE folder and separate out the MATerials from the POSEs

The DAZ stuff I leave alone
Character morphs poses and such go to modeltype CHAR charname-vendor
so I'd have G2F CHAR Courtney for Sydney or V3 CHAR ANNA-imadeitup

Materials go to Vx CLOTH - clothname-vendor, so V4 CLOTH - V4 Basic Wear would have materials for the V4 Basic Wear

HAIR MAT_hairname, so HAIR MAT Christine Hair

Magnet deformer poses goto DEFORMER_productname, ie. DEFORMER - V4 Hip Morphs

Actual poses goto modeltype_POSE_posesetname, so V4 POSE - Action-4sidedpolygon

A tap of the key letter I want to go takes me there, I just have to scroll through the group.
so that would be !, D, H, V or any others that I set up.

I'm still tweaking how things go, but this works.

Quote - I still prefer MAT poses, for me the work flow is easier not shifting rooms, but I'm lazy...LOL.

I believe in P8 and PP2010, you can Drag and Drop from the Material Library to the Pose Room.
No need to go to the Material Room, unless you want to modfy something.
I just tried it with M4 and no problems.

Using the same MAT Pose for both Poser and DS doesn't use the material powers of either program. All you get is The Basics.

> Quote - What bugs me (and always has) about MAT poses are this: > > They clog up my Pose folders. I have to root thru literally hundreds of folders to actually find a POSE. Some of those folders have no less than !!!!!! in front of the folder name because some doofus decided their folder should be at the top of the list. It's gotten nothing but *more* frustrating over the years. At least with materials, they can be placed in nice, neat folders and not interfere with anything else because the only thing in the materials folder are - oddly enough - materials ;o). I don't need to go on a scavenger hunt in the materials folder to find a prop for instance...lol. If i want to find a pose, I want to go to the pose folder and find one, not fish through a million and one MAT and MOR stuff. And no, I don't like injections being in there either, but at least for those, there's not an alternative yet. Let's hope SM figures that out soon in the next version of Poser...lol. > > Laurie

That's why multiple runtimes work great! I have a runtime with nothing but poses.

I have another with no thing but props....granted also in that folder are the MAT poses for those props.  But that is where continuity of naming comes in.  Whatever I name the  item folder in the character or prop library, I also give the same name to any other folder found in the other library folders, the same name. That way I can go folder to folder and just look for the name.  

I have dozens of runtimes  and know exactly where everything is and it takes me seconds to find it.

I do have multiple runtimes Acadia. I sort them by figure though ;o).

As for renaming things? I'm just not gonna put myself thru all that...lol. I don't have a spare week ;o).

Laurie

Quote - I do have multiple runtimes Acadia. I sort them by figure though ;o).

As for renaming things? I'm just not gonna put myself thru all that...lol. I don't have a spare week ;o).

Laurie

True, if you haven't been doing it all along it is time consuming.  But each time I install something I change the name on the folder.

Personally, I've never really seen the need for MAT poses, I think it was just easier for noob's to go to the Pose room instead of the material room. It kind of makes no sense as you are still clicking a tab either way!

DAZ likes to seperate themselves from Pose for reasons that only they know and MAT's were one way of doing that.

 well it' kind of handy to have the mat poses next to the other poses for the clothing or hair, eg I have some mitsu hair colours in the same folder with some movement poses for the hair,

And I have some characters with their mor files in the same folder as their mats for applying a texture. I like my mat poses thanks.

Also, almost every runtime I add when I buy stuff goes into a new folder and added as an external runtime.  Imight call it V4aircrew or something for the billy-t set, and then using the BB new library in poser pro 2010 or the semidieu library manager from rdna, it is actually blindingly fast to find that runtime, and open it to see all the mats that match that figure.

Love esther

 I wish Poser would move away from all these special files: cr2, pz2, hrz, injection files ...
When I buy a package i would like all the files that go with that package to be in one folder.  Mats, hair, conforming clothes, shoes, hand poses, all in that packages folder.  I think that would be a lot easier to deal with.

Interesting points, everyone!

I never considered the workflow issue. Personally I like to mess with my materials, so I usually end up taking a trip into the material room anyway. But I can also see how it would be nice to have everything you needed in the pose room. I agree that the naming conventions (or lack thereof) are kind of a pain. I mean, how many "!Aiko 3..." folders do you really need? (My installation of Aiko 3 came with about three of them, including two that start with "!MAT Aiko 3...". So annoying!) And besides, if all the folders start with "!", then don't they line up by alphabetical order just like they would without the "!"? (Yes, DAZ, I am talking to you :mad:)

I think I'll start adding both MAT poses and materials settings to Poser content I bring out. That way everyone can have the one they like to use

*" well it' kind of handy to have the mat poses next to the other poses for the clothing or hair, eg I have some mitsu hair colours in the same folder with some movement poses for the hair,

And I have some characters with their mor files in the same folder as their mats for applying a texture. I like my mat poses thanks."* 

I do exactly the same thing :-)

 I have External Runtimes for each Character and within those I have sorted all out so that I find poses faster, characters , Hair...

I only now get more confident with Poser, I was a DS girl before , and I do prefer the Material Room very very much.
If it was up to me there would not be Matposes in the Pose Folder, only Poses and Charcter Morphs.

Quote -  I wish Poser would move away from all these special files: cr2, pz2, hrz, injection files ...
When I buy a package i would like all the files that go with that package to be in one folder.  Mats, hair, conforming clothes, shoes, hand poses, all in that packages folder.  I think that would be a lot easier to deal with.

Guess you do not realize the following:

1. Poser 8+ does not need the files to be in their category folder, so you can move them into one folder yourself
   2. Having a file type (character, pose) is making filtering search results by type possible. I prefer this to the one file type can be nearly everything approach...

 Ahhh! Thanks, I did not know that.  Still using Poser 7 

i set up a pure 'Poses' runtime ( external) just for figure poses.
i do have the advantage that i am a new Poser user and started with P7 sr3, so from the very start i set up all external runtimes on a separate HDD.
because i am so used to the Content Manager in DS, the older way of runtime set ups would drive me crazy!   lol!
the only side effect of my way is that i have at least 30 runtimes! and expanding!  lol!

 I do have external Runtimes on an External Drive for all my Poser Characters, within each Runtimes I changed inside the individual folders and made folders so that I have not to search half an hour to find a pose, a characer, an outfit or hair...

One can set up Poser Runtimes very nicely.
The only thing that can not be moved or renamed are Geometries folders and / or Textures folders, other than that you can customice all you like.