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I do have one question you may be able to answer without screenshots (I don't have access to my PC at the moment):

Why is it that, regardless of whatever content I have in my scenes, every material but those for M4 and V4 always converts to Glossy in Reality?  It's like Glossy is the default shader type that Reality treats anything that isn't skin, leaving the user to figure out what to manually convert it to.  I thought Reality was supposed to be smarter than that while still allowing us the flexibility to further tweak the materials ourselves?

Materials in Lux have a type. These are the material types available:

• Glossy

• Matte

• Glass

• Velvet

• Cloth

• Metal

• Car paint

• Mix

• Mirror

• Layered

 

And maybe a couple of others that I forgot. Poser materials have no type. There is nothing in there that says "this materials describe a metal." So there is no precise, unambiguos way of knowing what the Poser shader is describing. 

The most general material that Lux has is Glossy so that is what is used by Reality. Then the program traverses all the nodes in the Poser shader to trieve the necessary information, like the textures used, how they are combined (Color Math, Mix, Add, Subtract etc. ), how they are used and what values there are for bump, specular, specular color and the like. 

The resulting material is configured as close as possible to the original. This is a lot of automatic conversion that is done in t ablink of an eye and which would take several hours, or even days, to be done manually.

From that point Reality provides a material editor. If the process was completely automatic then I could have saved eight months of development for the material editor :)

The reality is that Firefly and Lux are very, very different renderers. And that is the attraction in using Reality. If Lux was a "Firefly on steroids" then there would be little reason to use it. 

The fact that Lux is so much different is the reason to use it. 

The fact that Lux materials have a type simplifies many things. For example, if you need a material to be metallic simply change it to be of type Metal. The buillt-in properties of that metal, which require no work from you, would require a plethora of Poser nodes to be approximated. In Reality you don't need any of that. Simply change it to Metal.

Same for glass. The remaining parameters are basically fine-tuning. 

So, Reality does a lot of heavy-lifting to convert the Poser nodes into the equivalent Lux Textures. In Lux the term "texture" is the equivalent of "node" in Poser. The rest is up to you, which is what you want to do because only the artist can judge how to adjust some things to achieve his/her vision. That is not something that can be programmer nor should ever be programmed :) The small adjustments are what make art ... art.

Hope this helps.

Paolo

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