And make only some tiles reflective ...

Lots of choices ...

Including some funky ones :-)

I'm looking forward... 

we want to play with EZMat too :-) please...

Extreemly cool!!!

Great Idea well done

Snarly that is awesome! I am eagerly awaiting this.

Take my Money... :biggrin:

Hope you figure out a way to remove materials you accidently add to a figure or prop that there are no zones for those materials in the item to start with.

Looks amazing. Thanks for the preview.

Gary

Quote - Hope you figure out a way to remove materials you accidently add to a figure or prop that there are no zones for those materials in the item to start with.

Looks amazing. Thanks for the preview.

Gary

I completely agree and hope!

looks good.  yep - keep us posted please.

Love esther

Very cool stuff here.

As usual, late to the party. Getting back into Poser, and am working with this Church figure with 40-gazillion mat zones, each with a texture colour map (.jpg) and a few with a bump map. I've been slowly converting the material shaders to something more workable for me (I never use diffuse_value at 1, or use gamma for non-colour maps... I know there are scripts for that, but would love to see all that in one place.

Dumb question: does this app preserve the existing texture files, SG?

Quote - Dumb question: does this app preserve the existing texture files, SG?

Yes, when working in the Shader Helper tab it can do.

As for the plugins, then that is entirely up to each plugin's author.

Some 3D building apps make a zillion material zones.

Even some native poser figures have way to many material zones.

I spend my whole Christmas vacation on reducing and merging material zones using Blender.

Oh boy, that makes life easy in the material room.

I should have done that a long time ago.

Happy Posering, Tony

Cool! Very interesting.

Quote -
Even some native poser figures have way to many material zones.

What on earth is wrong with you!? It is ABSOLUTELY imperative that my figures' left pinky toes have a completely different material setup than the rest of the figure. Imperative, I tell you!

But yeah, that's why I invented MAT poses way back when :) Even Posette, Dork & company had too many zones.

oooooooooOOOOOHHH when is this being released????? AND is it compatable with pp2012? o_0 please tell me it is....

Quote - oooooooooOOOOOHHH when is this being released????? AND is it compatable with pp2012? o_0 please tell me it is....

The release date remains uncertain, but yes - it is compatible with PP2012 and P9 :-)

Development has slowed down a little over the festive period but I have resumed work on it today. No new screenshots as current work is focusing on debugging and efficiency improvements, although I did manage to code support for Photoshop (PSD) files this afternoon :-)

My testers have suggested a few funky new features too, so I'll be adding them in over the next few days. Then I'll be working on the last big enhancement - the facility to overlay graphics onto existing textures (think tattoos, scars, splashes, stains, decals etc.) The main difference between this feature and those currently on the market is that it will work with any existing shader on any model, and allow the arbitrary placement of the overlaid graphic. Should be fun to use.

Some of the testers are working on making plugins too, so there should be a nice selection of them available soon. Yay!

Oh. And the user guide too. Writing THAT is a daunting task :-(

Quote - > Quote - oooooooooOOOOOHHH when is this being released????? AND is it compatable with pp2012? o_0 please tell me it is....

The release date remains uncertain, but yes - it is compatible with PP2012 and P9 :-)

Development has slowed down a little over the festive period but I have resumed work on it today. No new screenshots as current work is focusing on debugging and efficiency improvements, although I did manage to code support for Photoshop (PSD) files this afternoon :-)

My testers have suggested a few funky new features too, so I'll be adding them in over the next few days. Then I'll be working on the last big enhancement - the facility to overlay graphics onto existing textures (think tattoos, scars, splashes, stains, decals etc.) The main difference between this feature and those currently on the market is that it will work with any existing shader on any model, and allow the arbitrary placement of the overlaid graphic. Should be fun to use.

Some of the testers are working on making plugins too, so there should be a nice selection of them available soon. Yay!

Oh. And the user guide too. Writing THAT is a daunting task :-(

OHHH great! I cant live with out EZskin. This looks even more mandatory for my system!

Nursoda's Kon figure is great fun for testing EZMat :-)

looks really useful!

You had me with the leather shaders, but...

1. Macs INVENTED drag and drop! How can you not have that in the Mac version?

2. Human skin shaders?

Yeah, you had me too with the leather shaders. I can't wait to get this!

Oh man this will sooooo be THE utility tool for Poser !!! :D

I can see this always open next to Poser window as it will be so handy :)

Quote - You had me with the leather shaders, but...

1. Macs INVENTED drag and drop! How can you not have that in the Mac version?

If anybody out there has a working example of drag and drop working in a Mac Poser addon (NB, not a regular script, but an addon) using a wxpython user interface, then please show me how to do it. Seriously, I'm not too proud to ask for help and I don't know how to make this work by myself. In Windows you read the API documentation, code it according to the funtion descriptions and it just works. Not so for the Mac. Could be just me being dim though - it happens! :-D

Quote - 2. Human skin shaders?

EZMat has EZSkin built into it for convenience. However, the thing to realise about EZMat is that it is a container for plugins - anybody can make plugins for it. So what functionality EZMat ends up with will depend on what plugins I, you and the rest of the community (and vendors) make for it. Even I don't know what EZMat will be able to do :-) Human skin shaders are certainly possible ...

Snarly, I was sold after seeing those screenshots - this looks like a must-have utility. I would be amazed if this was anything other than a runaway commercial sucess - and after how much you've given for free to the Poser community (Scenefixer is my single most-used Poser script), you so deserve!

Plus I have to ask - is bagginsbill involved in testing or plug-in development at all?? 

Quote - Snarly, I was sold after seeing those screenshots - this looks like a must-have utility. I would be amazed if this was anything other than a runaway commercial sucess - and after how much you've given for free to the Poser community (Scenefixer is my single most-used Poser script), you so deserve!

Hey, good to hear from ya sir! Thank you for the kind comments :-)

Quote - Plus I have to ask - is bagginsbill involved in testing or plug-in development at all??

Bagginsbill has, of course, been invited to collaborate and I'm still hoping that he will. I think this is the perfect vehicle for a lot of his work. However, it's been a while since I last heard from him so we'll just have to see ...

Just having a bit of fun with a slightly tweaked version of a plugin made by Structure, one of EZMat's testers :-)

snarly, please stop teasing us, give us the product, we want to play too!!

(I mean: it looks great. In the meantime, I am (re)writing the Poser FAQ etc on Materials. Can I just stop doing that as no-one will ever use Material Room again? )

Yes, yes, yes.  I use EZSkin all the time.  This would be highly useful.

Quote - snarly, please stop teasing us, give us the product, we want to play too!!

(I mean: it looks great. In the meantime, I am (re)writing the Poser FAQ etc on Materials. Can I just stop doing that as no-one will ever use Material Room again? )

Uh, no. A basic understanding of how the material room works is always a good thing.

Hi Snarly,

I've got a mac and I use semidieu's advanced library manager. I can select a whole folder full of clothes and drag and drop them onto the poser person and they can be asked to conform and magnetize to V4.  Is that what you mean?  I can also drag and drop multiple texture files using his smart mat thing and all the clothes will get textured in one hit.

Love esther

Quote - Uh, no. A basic understanding of how the material room works is always a good thing.

I fully agree. You still want to understand why to set Diffuse_Value to less than 1 and why you only want to use white as your reflective colour for everything except metal surfaces. Particularly if you create content for others, but even if it's just for yourself, certain concepts are just essential to understand.

On that note, I do hope that the next version of Poser will automatically detect colour maps vs non-colour information and adjust gamma accordingly, so we have less of that "anaemic-hair" look... :biggrin:

okay, I'll go on :-)

Quote - okay, I'll go on :-)

Yes, please do.

Robyn is right: there is no substitute for real understanding, and a FAQ will help enormously.

Besides, EZMat is a long, long way from a material room replacement. It can help a bit, sometimes, in some circumstances :-)

Also, let's not forget that EZMat is to be a commercial product, which means people may decide not to have it.

What the previous screenshots don't really show is that EZMat is also designed to encourage and help you work in the Material Room yourself, providing template shaders to get you started. But only a proper understanding of the Material Room will let you get the most from it.

By the way, I read just about any tutorial that I can find, and yours are among the very best. Thank you.

haha, yeah I didn't really intend to stop working on the FAQ / MatRoom tuts. Actually, I'm after exceeding the level of my Cloth Room ones - and make them more accessible using video, and yes I will finish the Cloth Room stuff before Chrismas :-)

An EZMat question in the meantime.

When translating scenes to LuxRender (via Pose2Lux or Reality) or to Octane, the support for all the pretty advanced things in Material Room is quite limited. The translations can handle most of the PoserSurface channels en the image-map node as well, but large node-trees plugged into Alt-Diffuse will get lost. Simply stated; when you can't get it done in the Simple interface to MatRoom, it's likely that you won't get it exported to LuxRender / Octane / any other external render out there.

Hence it might be relevant for some users to have a tool which simpifies things, and uses the common channels Diffuse, Specular etc to their best.
Can EZMat play a role in this or is it leaning heavily on the Alt-... channels instead?

And next...

Please do send me (site mail) the questions you want to get addressed in the MatRoom FAQ / Tuts, and whether you're willing to proof-read my concept texts. The more feedback in advance, the better I guess.

Quote - ...

An EZMat question in the meantime.

When translating scenes to LuxRender (via Pose2Lux or Reality) or to Octane, the support for all the pretty advanced things in Material Room is quite limited. The translations can handle most of the PoserSurface channels en the image-map node as well, but large node-trees plugged into Alt-Diffuse will get lost. Simply stated; when you can't get it done in the Simple interface to MatRoom, it's likely that you won't get it exported to LuxRender / Octane / any other external render out there.

Hence it might be relevant for some users to have a tool which simpifies things, and uses the common channels Diffuse, Specular etc to their best.
Can EZMat play a role in this or is it leaning heavily on the Alt-... channels instead?

Yes, for sure - it's already on the 'to do' list :-)

Quote - ... and whether you're willing to proof-read my concept texts. The more feedback in advance, the better I guess.

Definitely. I'd be very happy to give my input and do some proof-reading. No questions of my own spring to mind at the moment, but I'll let you know if I think of any.

Hey all - sorry I go dark so much. As always, swamped with work. I like this project, however, and will try to force myself to participate a little bit every day.

Today I finally opened the files that SG gave me nearly a month ago!

Been having a bit of a fight with Poser. I still have my older Win 7 desktop and my trusty PP2012 on it but I'm trying to use my shiny new Win 8 and PP2014. I frequently experience a strange malady of my whole computer when running a render which subsequently remains until I reboot. It causes my system to think it is out of RAM even though only 1.6 of 8 GB are in use. The hard disk is then running 100% swapping the Windows page file for all apps, constantly, making the system too slow to use even to bring up task manager (takes 5 minutes).

Quote - Today I finally opened the files that SG gave me nearly a month ago.

They'll be a bit out of date :-)

I'll zip up a new distro for you ...

I was asked to make a 'clay render' plugin for EZMat so I took a bit of time off today to do it. It can turn the whole scene to one colour quickly, optionally adding ambient occlusion nodes to the materials and, if you want, retaining bump and displacement settings.

Here's the Snow Machine demo scene from earlier in the thread turned to white ..

You can choose the colour ...

Or just apply it to individual objects, thereby achieving different colours

All in all , pretty simple stuff, but somebody wanted it :-)

I see it respects transparency as well, great !!

Here is a sample render. These four pawns show the four fundamental basic "materials" that you can make with relatively few nodes in modern Poser. These were all made by the same EZMat plugin - a simple extension of the original BBGlossy shader.

1. Diffuse node - paint/enamel/rock - anything truly opaque

2. Reflect node - metal

3. Refract node - glass

4. Scatter node - plastic/rubber