Quote - I got your analogy last night, but it was getting late and I didn't post these follow up I should have:

1. Wouldn't the fact that some of the colors on the RBG be missing a color or two or have them at a very low number make them a little more problematic for use as a specular or bump map?  If red was 20 and blue was 16, you need to hope green has the information on the map you are looking for.  I thought specular and bump maps need to be black to white in color for best effect.

I don't know what you're talking about here. The red channel is an independent gray-scale map and has whatever it has regardless of the contents of the other two channels. The same is true of blue and green. A color image is literally 3 gray-scale images combined in a sandwich, with each passing through a different color phosphor once it reaches your screen. No data pass between the layers, ever. Everything in RGB is done three times, once for each channel, with almost no information across channels being combined. The only exception is the HSV node.

Quote - 2.  Are there any realistic times where you need 2 or 3 seperate maps (not including transmaps) that splitting up RGB won't cut it?

No - splitting the RGB channels produces identical data as if they were separate gray scale images. Whatever you put in, you get back out. They do not interact. They do not interfere. They are completely independent data collections.

Quote - 3.  If I had a bump and specular map as seperate ones as a creator, I'm assuming I should combine them into two channels of an RGB to save the end user's processing time.

The word should is too strong. This is a bit of an esoteric angels-on-a-pin discussion. You're not going to save a lot of render time by combining the maps. However, you may save a lot of texture memory.

Quote - Also this is a bit tangental to the discussion but if I added 6 extra image maps to a material, but I didn't connect them to anything, would their being there slow down processing time?

I don't know. If they get mip-mapped no matter what, then yes it adds time. I'm not sure if Poser pays attention to maps before or after figuring out if they are needed. Anyway, I'm talking about render preparation (loading textures). Once the render starts, a million unused maps have no impact. In theory.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)