Quote - You're racing ahead but I'm not sure for what purpose.

Creating four templates, each of which only gets copied to one material, is pretty much pointless. You will have to make changes in 4 places, so that they get applied in 4 places - that has no value whatsoever.

The point of VSS is to capture commonalities - to create a single shader for many material zones, so that instead of making a particular change 9 times, you do it once. For example, if there are 9 skin zones, you use VSS so you have one skin material to work on, and it applies to the 9 skin zones.

Now back up a second. The wings have four materials, but is it your intention those are made of different things or not? If they are made of the same thing, then they all get the same shader, and so you only need one template for all. 

Just because the nodes move around from one screen shot to the other doesn't mean they are different. Just because the images are different doesn't mean the shaders are different.

I see Spots node connected to the same channel. I see color maps and bump maps connected up to the same places. I cannot see the individual node parameters so I can't confirm that the shaders are identical, but at a glance they appear to be. 

So why do you want or need 4 different substances? Aren't they all the same substance? Feather?

We use different template shaders when the substance they model is different. For example, eyeball is different from skin, so we have different substances implemented as different shaders. But hand skin is the same as leg skin, so we use only one shader for both, even though they need different color and bump maps. That is the objective of VSS. Given that the actual color/bump/specular/displacement maps are taken out of the equation - what is the same across multiple materials? Capture those as templates.

 

BB, I'm so confused! You are throwing so much information at me at one time that I can't process it all and I'm feeling very overwhelmed. :(

I just need to know the bare basics of what I need to do.  The hows and whys of what is being done needs to come later, after I understand how to actually create something that works. I can't integrate it all :(

Initially I had 1 material zone (template wing), 1 copy node (copy template wing) with 2 rules (feathers and wing).  I understood the concept of the rules IE: feathers would look for and target all things with the word "feather" in it.  wing would look for and target all things with the word "wing" in it.

But after that I get completely lost.

You said I need to go to the new VSS material zone for the wing I created, and put a material node setup in.  I didn't know what material zone from the WQ Wings to copy over to that new VSS material zone.

All of the WQ Wing material zones are different. The image maps have different images.  Some fuzzy like in my earlier screen shots, others actual feather shapes, and the wing has a whole wing image.  The settings in the poser surface node are different for each of the WQ Wing material zones.  So again, I didn't know what node setup I was to copy over the the single VSS material zone "Template Wing"

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
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This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi