Otis, You are right, I haven't put together any images or tutorials like I do with most releases. Without that it's hard to see what possible use this tools has. Unfortunately it's sort of the nature of the tool. Because Shader Ops just modifies the output of existing shaders it's hard to build a scene, point, and say "see there is a Shader Op!" It's not so obvious a tool as Anything Grooves. The limitations I saw that prompted me to build Shader Ops are these. First, I was never happy with what I could do with the built in functions and some of my own. I found myself looking at a Mixer function with Noise in it thinking "I wish this had more contrast", or " was brighter", etc. Several of the tools are designed to do that. The other biggie for me was Real UV. Last year I picked up Light Wave. It's a great tool and really shows how much more mature it is over Carrara. There is a tremendous depth of features. Of course it's nearly 10x the cost and the UI feels more grown than designed. Since I still do 99.99% of my personal stuff in Carrara, never really getting hooked on Light Wave, I thought of stuff that would make my Carrara experience easier. One of the things I found really helpful, especially in architectural stuff, is projection mapping based on world coordinates. So if you know your brick texture is 7' by 7', it can be 7' by 7' instead of a poor approximation you get by tiling it 2 x 2 on your 10' object. It really solves a lot of scale problems for that sort of thing. I hope that helps. Additionally Shader Ops is one of those sort of tools that downloading and playing in evaluation mode a little might illuminate some of the possibilities. In the meantime I will be working on getting some tutorials and images so that it's lack of obviousness can be overcome. Thanks, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins