You said "I replaced the material in one of the template materials with LLToon by loading it from the library.  This just blows away the texture map."

The LLToon already has a blank color map (image map) node in it. What texture map was blown away when you loaded it from the library? Loading a shader into the template material is a normal Poser material loading operation and it will completely replace what is there prior to the loading. Loading the LLToon into the VSS prop template material is not the work of VSS, so nothing magic will happen. The work happens later.

The LLToon already contains a blank image map, whose job will be to get filled in later with the color map.

clrMap = AGC(PM2(ImageMap().labelled("Color Map")))

The Color Map node is part of the template material - ready to go. You should not be saying " I just added the image map node in there.". It's already there. Your comment that loading LLtoon "blows away the texture map" is confusing us.

Here are the steps.

Load the VSS prop. Load the template shader into it (LLToon in this case). See to it that VSS will be synchronizing to the figure and props you want by editing the Apply Rules. Now Synchronize. It will distribute the LLToon shader to all target materials and as it does so, if the target material has an image map serving the role of color map in it at that time, it will still have it after the synchronize, but it will be in the LLToon Color Map.

If the target material does not have any image map populated at the time you do the synchronize, then the image map in the template shader will be replaced with whatever is in that node's background parameter. In this case - white.

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