I agree with you about a lot of that, Vilters.  Constraints or guidelines for render settings would make more sense to me than the suggested restrictions to the Material Room and node-linking options.  I simply don't understand why it should matter whether users can link a velvet node to displacement or transparency or whatever.  (I've actually used velvet in transparency on a shader, IIRC.  It provided an effect I liked at the time.)

I am not a math guy, so I fully sympathize with the idea of removing the need to know physics and math from the Material Room.  But I'm also a tinkerer.  I experiment, I futz around to see what happens.  Poser allows this, and I love it for that.  I have a bunch of shaders in frequent use which do not follow any set of rules except "Ooh, that looks cool!"  Take away the options for some of the bizarre ways nodes can be linked up, and you break my shaders.  "Waah, poor Cage," right?  Maybe it's not just me.  Maybe others make use of the creative potential of "impossible" node links.  What you propose for the Material Room (and I focus on that specifically) seems like you want a formalized regression introduced as an enhancement.

I would love to see some parts of Poser made more accessible.  Engage me on the topic of Gamma Correction some time, if you want to see how my small corner of the user base can freak out over awkward or inapproachable features.  :lol:  Gamma Correction apparently represents "possible" lighting parameters, versus Poser's legacy lighting, which was mathematically inaccurate and "impossible".  I will engage in slippery slope argumentation.  "Why not tell users that they can only use 'possible' lighting setups?" I ask.  Why not dictate to them how they can rig a figure?  Much of Poser is arguably too complex.  Too many notes.  Trim a few.  Which few, sire?

There's some sort of balance to be struck, with such concerns.  I don't trust the absolutist tone of "Some "impossible" possibilities should be blocked."  Rather than closing off possibilities, I would like to think in terms of making Poser's higher potential more accessible.  There are surely ways of doing this, other than removing existing features or babysitting users to tell them what they should or shouldn't do with their creativity.  :unsure:

I wish we could split off a sub-thread, dangit.

 

BTW, what is "MSR"?  It sounds like something I would read on a cereal box, or some term relating to quaterly profit reports. 

===========================sigline======================================================

Cage can be an opinionated jerk who posts without thinking.  He apologizes for this.  He's honestly not trying to be a turkeyhead.

Cage had some freebies, compatible with Poser 11 and below.  His Python scripts were saved at archive.org, along with the rest of the Morphography site, where they were hosted.