Quote - I wasn't complaining that SM didn't bundle more materials in Poser ;). I was complaining that the material room itself is a WHOLE lot harder than it has to be. I mean, it's a hobbyist program ffs. Why, in all these years (since I've had Poser 6) can't I figured out the material room? Why can't others? Because it's too convoluted and unnecessarily confusing compared to the rest of the program. Poser is the only program I use where I have problem with materials. I mean, why in the name of Mike would one need a shader that has more than a hundred nodes if something wasn't seriously STUPID in the material room? Sorry...I know BB knows what he's doing, but I think that's just insane...lol.

/rant

Laurie

My personal view on that point is that SM should employ Snarlygribbly and BagginsBill (and whoever else) to make a kind of "EZMaterials" UI mode... e.g. extending the principles of EZSkin to cover more / all common material types... and having that sit, as an "Intermediate" mode between the "Basic" and "Advanced" Mat Room modes; i.e. written into the core Poser program... in C++(?)... rather than a Python plugin.

Of course, those guys... or someone else could do this as a Python plugin, in due course I'm sure too. But if we're going down the line of what you're talking about and having it backed by SM...

...anyway, I think then we'd have the best of all worlds... something more straight forward, but still also the optional power to tinker with the fundamentals.

Where would the quality of Poser renders be stuck at if BB and others had been unable to tinker in the mat room as they have done over the past few years?

Personally, despite being fairly daunted at first, I'm now having quite a lot of fun playing with joining different nodes together and seeing what comes out. Of course, most of what comes out for me is still guff, LOL :lol:

Hmmm....they might be as well just ditching the "Basic" mat room mode altogether, if they were to do something like the above.... does anyone use that?