"almost all of it looks better with Bagginsbill's shaders replacing most of the defaults... certainly when these defaults are just using diffuse and bump image / colour maps"

Certainly, and raytraced reflection and refraction too. Then why not let that be to the newbie so he can feel that he/she has accomplished something? Do you know something about pedagogy?

 (I must go, its very late)

"Is it not the case that the top end 3D software packages all, also have equally or more complex shader systems than Poser in fact?
"

Maxon Cinema4D does not have a node based material system
(Thankfully IMHO!!!)

Neither does Lightwave or MODO
or Maxwell or Vray.

Now.... I challenge anyone here to go visit the official Galleries of the programs& engines I just mentioned
and compare the renders  there to what you see in the galleries here.

It takes more than some complicated wire noded shaders to make quality CG renders IMHO
as a weak render engine&lighting system (like posers) will defeat the best shader setups every time.

Cheers

Quote - As a Poser2010 user, i can understand what vintorix and the OP mean. With Poser 2010 they built in gamma correction into Poser (someone might have read about it). But they built it into the pro versions only, not the cheap versions, probably not the best idea they had, but anyway: i think vendors want to get the most customers, so they continue to make complicated materials that somehow fake gamma correction with the cheap poser versions, some of them likely unknowingly. Because DS has gamma correction built in, too, the vendors would get similar problems trying to support DS as they would by trying to support gamma correction in Poser2010.
So when a vendor writes in the README "Materials for Poser only", my brain automatically translates this into "Poser 5 materials only, because i do not know what gamma correction is, Poser2010 users beware!" (Of course they cannot write it literaly, because if they do not know what GC is, they will only see that it does not work, not why it does not work). So when buying models from vendors i do not know, i look if there are DS materials included, even if i never plan on using them. A vendor who is capable of creating materials for both DS and Poser should have have at least a rough understanding of what gamma correction is and how to deal with it (at least i hope so).
Unfortunately the reverse is not true, so as a fallback option i look if there are Poser4 or PoserProPack materials included. Those usually seem to be very simple (so called click-and-render-crowd materials) and probably can easily be made to work in both DS and Poser, regardless of the version. Most of e.g. Stonesmason's materials are of that kind (who btw does not seem to have major problems making good stuff for both DS and Poser).
So the net effect is, that if i want to know how easy it would be to use a product in Poser2010, i have to look if that product supports DS or Poser4; and this sounds a bit awkward, does it not?

Sorry to say so, nice line of thought, but it's not the case a lot of times. The whole deal has nothing to do with gamma correction at all. A lot of vendors when they do write materials for poser only, they do mean for poser only. It's simply because the have used Poser material room features that DS does not support, unless you redo the complete product in DS. As soon as you start using material nodes in poser, you cannot just port them to DS. DS does not support them and the majority of features do not translate over to DS. This has nothing to with GC at all. I've got products that use poser shader, no textures at all. If I want those same shaders in DS, I have to rebuild them there, which I cannot, since I'm not that familiar with DS to recreate the shaders in DS. I do have DS materials in some of my products, but those are mainly textures.

Understanding GC does not get my poser shaders into ds at all, GC has nothing to do with that at all and I do find you reasoning very strange. Poser materials only simply means, sorry guys, I've created my materials in Poser and there is not an option to get these materials into DS, regardless if gc was or wasn't used.

As for Stonemason..... he doesn't use any poser material room features or DS shader features, he's just an awesome texture creator.

There are more then enough vendors out there who have no clue what gamma correction is and still make awesome materials for both poser and ds that work great.

Absolutely... if a vendor is providing textures anywhere near the quality of Stonemason's, I'm not going to complain if he hasn't done something fancy on top of them using the fresnel_blend Node...

But that doesn't mean I won't try doing that myself, using something from a Bagginsbill recipe...

;-)

Quote - "almost all of it looks better with Bagginsbill's shaders replacing most of the defaults... certainly when these defaults are just using diffuse and bump image / colour maps"

Certainly, and raytraced reflection and refraction too. Then why not let that be to the newbie so he can feel that he/she has accomplished something? Do you know something about pedagogy?

 (I must go, its very late)

Yes, sure... personally, I do take, what I think is (?) your point here too Vintorix... i.e. that certain levels of "shading" within Poser (e.g. within newer versions) are maybe effectively best treated as advanced user settings (similar even to adjusting IDL bounces etc)... on top of good textures... and shared separately to the distribution of the vendor products... is this the kind of idea that you mean??

Cheers ;-)

Quote - "Is it not the case that the top end 3D software packages all, also have equally or more complex shader systems than Poser in fact?
"

Maxon Cinema4D does not have a node based material system
(Thankfully IMHO!!!)

Neither does Lightwave or MODO
or Maxwell or Vray.

Now.... I challenge anyone here to go visit the official Galleries of the programs& engines I just mentioned
and compare the renders  there to what you see in the galleries here.

It takes more than some complicated wire noded shaders to make quality CG renders IMHO
as a weak render engine&lighting system (like posers) will defeat the best shader setups every time.

Cheers

Are these high-end examples working more like it would work if I was using, by way of a vaguely comparative example, Reality Studio with Daz... or LuxRender with Poser?

Cheers ;-)

"Are these high-end examples working more like it would work if I was using, by way of a vaguely comparative example, Reality Studio with Daz... or LuxRender with Poser?

These" high end examples" are what I mean when I say you need more than  geeky, complicated node math Shaders to create good FINAL renders
(as their galleries demonstrate)

You need a Modern lighting  system with true area lights with true area shadows.
 A "physical Sky"system for outdoor renders so you can dispense with ridiculous "Sky dome" props,  true, Fast GI engine for Gi animation renders etc etc or all of your
cumbersome geek friendly wire node shaders& materials dont really mean much IMHO.

Cheers

The question at hand though is not whether or not poser should have more 'high end' features or a different way of doing things, but what in poser delivers better results and how does that affect compatability between versions of poser and between different software packages.  I dont think the point can be made, as a generality, that equivalent quality can be obtained via the basic material room as it can via the advanced material room.  Obviously some things look just fine with a really good texture in some situations.  But most things look better with advanced shaders.

I cant argue that Stonemasons stuff looks great.  I've been in awe of his work since day one.  That being said, you generally are looking at the textures from further away or as a background to the main focal point of the image.  Painted concrete, metal or stone in the background is not the same as reasonably close-up human skin, cloth, leather etc.   I cant recall any clothing items or character sets that I have bought(recently) that dont use some of the shader system.  I am very picky in what I buy so if the preview renders are only so so I dont invest.

Quote - "Are these high-end examples working more like it would work if I was using, by way of a vaguely comparative example, Reality Studio with Daz... or LuxRender with Poser?

These" high end examples" are what I mean when I say you need more than  geeky, complicated node math Shaders to create good FINAL renders
(as their galleries demonstrate)

You need a Modern lighting  system with true area lights with true area shadows.
 A "physical Sky"system for outdoor renders so you can dispense with ridiculous "Sky dome" props,  true, Fast GI engine for Gi animation renders etc etc or all of your
cumbersome geek friendly wire node shaders& materials dont really mean much IMHO.

Cheers

Quote - "Are these high-end examples working more like it would work if I was using, by way of a vaguely comparative example, Reality Studio with Daz... or LuxRender with Poser?

These" high end examples" are what I mean when I say you need more than  geeky, complicated node math Shaders to create good FINAL renders
(as their galleries demonstrate)

You need a Modern lighting  system with true area lights with true area shadows.
 A "physical Sky"system for outdoor renders so you can dispense with ridiculous "Sky dome" props,  true, Fast GI engine for Gi animation renders etc etc or all of your
cumbersome geek friendly wire node shaders& materials dont really mean much IMHO.

Cheers

I can't get into the debate here but I just wanted to point out that even all of that ^ isn't enough. The artist has to know how to use all these things to make a pleasing image. You can have access to Modo's render engine or Vray or Maxwell and still produce an image that would get you laughed out of the most forgiving of galleries.  A pretty mess is still a mess, right? :)

Carry on.

Okay, so I see Vray for Cinema4d seems to use a more linearly structured system, with a layer-based UI metaphor?

Underneath that, well... not sure its reasonable to compare Firefly with VRay? The price differential alone kind of precludes that surely?

However in terms of the material configuration in Poser, on the whole I'm quite happy with Poser's nodes based system... and frankly, if Bagginsbill is happy working with it... that's even better for me ;-)

If I need a more linearly structured way of configuring the Poser material nodes, well, there's the facility to write an intermediate UI layer... e.g. as Snarlygribbly has done with EZSkin?

Should SM do this themselves in due course... perhaps... but as an end user I'm not too fussed who does it. In a lot of ways, for me personally at least, having Python based add-ons for this sort of thing, made in an open way by the likes of Snarlygribbly, is better... because if I'm not entirely happy with how they work, I can always change them.

Just my opinion on this...

...and I'm not saying, if I was working at a level where Cinema4d and Vray was in my budget, that I wouldn't be equally happy with that system ;-)

We are getting pretty far afield from the OP question...

How do you convert DS mats to Poser mats?

Short answer: you can't. You have to start from scratch. Thank you Daz...lol.

Laurie

It's pretty much a given that you can't (easily at all) convert materials between render engines. DAZ would have had to use the Firefly engine in order for the materials to be compatible. AFAIK, you cant transfer VRay materials between VRay for Max and VRay for SketchUp etc. Thank AutoDesk, Maxon, Chaos Group, e-On etc. etc.