Quote - Now on whether or not I make MAT Files?  I haven't made them in several years now, thankfully.  They are inferior to Material Collections, which work on Standalone Props - MAT Poses do not (unless you hack them a certain way and a Figure is in the scene).

There's actually another problem with pz2 MATs that I suddenly remembered really annoys me.

Let's say you've got a clothed character, and you want to apply a MAT to the clothing, and fail to notice that you've got the character selected instead. The pz2 will proceed to add those material zone to the character (which won't show up, since there's no geometry associated with those materials). For a one-off image, this isn't a huge deal, but if you're reusing that character, you have to either manually remove those extra materials or use one of the add-on tools you can get that will allowyou to do it.

And it's not just clothing materials applied accidentally: I don't know how many character MAT files I've used where when I go into the material room after applying it I see extra materials created because somehow there was a material named in the MAT that was slightly different from what it was supposed to be: variations on "tear" and "nostril" are especially common.

With an MC6, however, when you apply it Poser will specifically point out if there are materials that aren't present in what you are applying it do and ask if you want to create them. If you click on "no", those extra material zones aren't created. It saves much grief.