Wondering if, other than having to apply maps and shaders, there is some downside to many material zones not typically seen in Poser figures. Many of the mat zones will call on same texture files. Curious if there is some performance overhead in Poser that would make this undesirable.

Thanks

Well, when I imported a Noesis-generated FBX and found it had ~70++ sub-rigs, each with its own material calling one of ~25+ texture sets (DSB+T), I was a tad disheartened...

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As I understand it, GPU rendering must load all textures along with the models.

By analogy with meshes where, IIRC, 'Duplicate' command thriftily references original OBJ, PP2 or CR2, while a new library load or import piles up over-heads, how does eg Superfly handle texture calls ??

I've just thought, with a shudder, that auto-loading or dragging in a texture might add significant over-heads, while selecting from drop-down list --The one starting with 'None'-- may not...

A minor issue for 'simple' scenes but, when you're invoking a bunch of 2k, 4k, even 8k texture sets per material, with HDRI back-grounds...

Any chance of the Coder Gurus laying out the resource costs ??

Also, a plea for an 'engineering' dashboard' so we know what's stretching Poser, and so how close to failure we're flying... 

More than typical amount of mat zones for a "human" figure. Said mat zones calling on a typical amount of texture files, 5-6 UDIM tiles at most.

Nevermind

I think it will be fine, I've created articulated figures with a comparable number of material zones before. I'm just being overly conversational about it.

Disregard.

Many zones can be useful for certain types of render passes, which are then used for (re)coloring on a comic-book page. For instance, the free "More Poser 12 helper scripts" set on ShareCG has a Poser script to set all ToonIDs to a random high color (i.e. relatively bright, compared to the dull and dark defaults).

The scene can then be output as a Firefly "Auxiliary" render of the ToonIDs, to then be used in Photoshop when paint-bucketing in some consistent cross-panel comic-book colours. The line-art would be separate in Photoshop, laid on top of the color flats with the white knocked out via an Action.

Of course, the ideal is to have just enough PoserSurface zones seen in a render, but not too many. But if the clothing is intricate, then having many zones may be useful for postwork. Such as when using render passes that allow for fine selections (e.g. "select by colour" the 24 brass buttons on a steampunk outfit) in Photoshop.