@wolf359: I agree completely. The success of Maxwell suports my belief that a comprehensive material library will be the most effective solution for Pose2Lux. A material library on that scale can only be achieved by a concerted community effort, and taht could be facilitated by providing effective GUI-based tools to construct the materials.

@Artbee: It seems PovRay takes a similar approach to P2L - apart from 'Gradient_Bump' the list of channels used is the same as that used by P2L. P2L definitely does need a GUI for building materials though! However, I have been impressed by what others have achieved using just a text editor

@Kawecki: I agree with what you're saying but I think we already have that in Pose2Lux - we just need enhancements to the GUI to make it easier to use. In P2L you can assign a material to multiple surface areas. You can then make global changes to all those surfaces by editing the material definition. At the moment the P2L UI only makes that easy if you've used the 'Custom material' option. Access to the parameters of all the other materials is currently only possible via a text editor but the P2L roadmap inlcudes a WYSIWYG editor for library materials.

@Everyone: It will be a while before I can turn my attention to the WYSIWYG material editor. I want to rewrite the user guide first and even that has to fit in between several other projects, including my 'EZSkin' tool for PP2012 and a new version of the Snow Machine script. I'd be delighted if someone else wanted to help with the editor but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the offers to come in :-)

One of the practical problems to overcome with the P2L material editor is this: Materials made for renderers like Maxwell and Fryrender are typically 'absolute', by which I mean that when you choose to use a material in your scene the surface takes on all the properties of the defined material. Easy.

P2L, however, is primarily a 'converter', or exporter. Most of the defined materials in the built-in libraries are not complete in themselves - they take bits (e.g. imagemaps) from the Poser shader. So a WYSIWYG material editor has the challenge of showing what a material will look like, but not knowing exactly how it's going to be used. P2L materials have 'placeholders' such as 'USE_KS' (use the specular colour) and 'USE_KdMAP' (use the imagemap plugged into Diffuse_Color). As such you can only get a WYSIWYG view if you give the material editor a Poser material to work on. Someone else using the same P2L material on a completely different Poser material may see quite different results.

All these issues can be overcome of course, but it's not as straightforward as you might think.

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