Quote - I've been using (B) for my own stuff for a while, mainly for props; I think the main disadvantage of this is having to use Poser's clunky math nodes to extract the requisite part / channel / call it what you will.

There's also no established convention (that I'm aware of) for how to encode an RGB image for this purpose. I've settled on Red = Specular, Green = Bump and Blue = Displacement, but that's fairly arbitrary (it's the order they appear in the Root node, top to bottom). This leaves Transparency unaccounted for, but I think this is best served with a single-channel (grayscale) image.

The screenshot shows a color image consisting of a triangle, a square and a circle separated out into 3 grayscale images for those who fancy experimenting. (BB, please tell me there's a more elegant way of accomplishing this!).

those are very simple examples that i have been using for years. simple. transforming a bump map and a specular map with a lot of different shades of grey,black and white would be hard right?