I can think of a way to make it possible, but it depends on lighting more than anything. I want to render a complete material, the way it shows in the thumbnail in the Materials room, but without any of the distortion of the lighting effects, and at a large size, like 2000x2000. I figure I could use a UV-mapped square, apply the material to it, and render it using the Front camera so there's no camera distortion. I can only think that a white infinite light, directly in front of the square (i.e., no X- or - offsets, no rotation at all) might give back the original colors with no shading.

It would be great to have something like this in Poser, where one could render out a material as a layered PSD. Maybe a Python script or something ...

Has anyone tried this (or had a desire to ;) ) ?

If you design the shader so that it does all its work with nodes and plugs into Alternate_Diffuse, then the same arrangement of nodes can be plugged into the background material color. The "background" is what gets rendered when your scene (or part of it) is empty and there's nothing to draw.

The beauty of the background as compared to a unit UV prop is:

1. It ignores light

2. It cannot produce perspective distortion no matter what camera you use

3. The UV span works exactly 0 to 1 - no fiddling.

I think this has been covered in a few threads, over the years.  I'm pretty sure one or more techniques has been outlined in those threads.  Unfortunately, I'm not very adept with Rosity's Search function.  The closest I can find is a post where Ockham shows how to use the P shader variable to generate a displacement map.  He includes a pz3 file which shows his basic setup, which may help in some ways, but the example uses material ambience and no lighting.  Some other process would be needed to light the rendered material.

I'm pretty sure bagginsbill has outlined a process for this, in one of those threads, which is based on a mathematically correct application of optics.  Umm.  :unsure:

At any rate, here's Ockham's example:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=4069505&ebot_calc_page

Scooped by BB himself!  :lol:

Thanks, guys! I had been told that you might have touched on this already, bagginsbill, but my search didn't return anything that looked relevant (imagine that! :biggrin:). Dopey me - I hadn't thought about rendering it to the background! It's already UV-mapped and self-illuminating! :biggrin: