That's correct; it does work that way if you have an obj with all of the correct groups.  It doesn't, however, work to have an obj with only the head and neck and an actor with all the parts listed.  It says the vertex count is incorrect then.  I don't know if just using "Clear" on all of the parts that aren't necessary works.  I'm going to try that as soon as I'm to a good point with testing something else, and I actually get some sleep.

OK, now this is interesting to me.  I had the same problem with V4 WM.  Who does not have as many or the same magnets as V4, and doesn't have the same rigging (obviously).  I'm checking now to see if the pure obj has the same problem.

Yep, same problem.  I have to suspect that this is a fairly new development, considering the large number of dynamic cloak products I know of and have seen used. 

edit:  Just to clarify, I mean cloaks for V4 specifically.

Very interesting.  I want to say that I haven't had this problem with hoods, but I can't remember because the other problems I've had with hoods trumped everything else.    Easy enough to check...

Pardon, but what is the collision offset in inches?  Oh, and I'd be willing to try this out.  I don't like conforming. 

Yeah, the highlights are an issue.  He hasn't made new stuff in so long that the tech changed.  People even map hair differently now, because they can afford the resources for more textures.  But his hair styles and meshes are absolutely classic, because they're elegant and simple.  If I ever manage to figure out how to model hair, I'm using his approach as a basis, not the more multi-strand approach popular today. 

Kamion - I totally understand about P9.  Comfort with your tool is really important.  Just to let you know, you can make everything that floats in P7 float in P8 and P9 as well.   That said, I can comfortably shrink my PP 2012 screen to about 1/4 of my screen, where P7 I really could only work at full screen.  I generally find that the new interface has much less dead space for icons and labels that are the same size or smaller.   I'm pretty definitely missing something in terms of what  you're looking for and not finding in the P9 interface, so I'm not betting floating the panels will make things better for you.   I just figured you might not know.

FFD - Just to warn, Fastscatter behaves very strangely and inconsistently when you add lights.  It technically shouldn't do anything at all without lights because it's a shading node, and shouldn't affect BionicRooster's material at all.  I'm betting that it does affect it, which shows how unpredictably it behaves.  That's the reason you don't see Fastscatter skin materials everywhere, why there were all sorts of SSS kluges before P9.  It was completely unreliable, with raytraced shadows producing major errors.

Quote - Bills and real life expenses keep me from upgrading to a newer Poser, but hoping to get it as soon as things are caught up.

As for the GI in P7, I have the script already, just kinda forgot I had it :o)

Oh!  Sorry, I cross-posted.  I meant that in response to Kamion saying he has P9 but is stuck in P7. 

If you have the hardware to run it, then waiting for a better time to buy P9 is a good idea.  By the time I got P7 it was $20.  They're always pretty good about selling old copies cheaply or giving them away.

Actually, I think there's a backdoor to get to IDL/GI in P7 that's rudimentary but still better than gather.  If I could remember who found it and tried it out I could find it.  Was it two main people trying it out?

Why are you stuck with P7?

Actually, the gather node is not useful today.  It did a very clumsy job of what IDL now accomplishes in general.  Do not use gather in P9.  Just turn on IDL. 

Gather was fun, but very rudimentary in terms of developing indirect lighting.

There doesn't need to be any new extensions for "bioluminescence" (quotes not to be snarky, but to because I'm assuming this is a very specific effect and not something more precisely modeled after true bioluminescence).   For the edge glow effect , just make an ambient material that takes an Edge Blend.  You can make it with a black inner color and a white outer color and feed it into Ambient Value to just work with one ambient color, or you can set up two different colors in the Edge Blend and feed that into Ambient Color.

That's the simple approach.  If you want to get more creative with your glow, you can do all kinds of things with other nodes.  That's the wonderful thing about a node architecture.  You can always build your way to advanced materials.

Again, thanks so very much for your generosity!

Joints in general, but specifically shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles.

Only the script needs to be in the central runtime.  I used it with all my V4 files in a Version 4 runtime and it worked just fine.  It made a character file in the same folder that my originals (one preloaded with morphs, one from the plain base) were in.

Quote - Maybe I'm cranky these days, KW, but I find myself reacting emotionally against posts which try to assert what "everyone" does and what the "general population" needs.  That could just be me being irritated because I've been handed the spiel about "linear" workflows before and it reads to me like a lot of garbledygook which is intended to shift the topic slightly while not clearly stating much of anything.

All of which perhaps indicates that my self-imposed withdrawal from Poserdom may not be ready to be ended yet.  :lol:  Back in my hidey-hole, then.

Cage - Please don't retreat from the conversation.  I think I'm not saying what I mean very well.  I'm not talking about what people need to do with their work.  I'm just trying to say what I think is possible and isn't in terms of Poser's programming.  As you know, probably better than I do, programming is good for fixing a consistent problem.  It sucks for fixing an inconsistent problem.  The more inconsistent the problem is, the less programming is able to fix it. 

In my experience, not only does each person make materials in their own manner (outside of people who follow Bagginsbill's style, who probably already use linear workflow), but most people don't even approach different materials in the same way.   Implementing linear workflow is just a mathematical transformation.  Deciding what to apply that transformation to might be problematic, but not the transformation itself.  The grey area of what to transform will only affect materials and lights so much.  The big change will always come from implementing the workflow itself, and I don't see a programmatic way to mitigate that in some ways and not in others according to the particular vision of the material or light maker.

Poser can't analyze a node structure, turn that into an understanding of an aesthetic, and then implement the linear workflow version of it.  It can't guess what someone intends by their material.  It can't guess that this ambient boost wasn't meant to make the material glow, but that one was.  Different people did and still do different things with each material they make. I could see transforming the old face_off RSS or the original V4 skin material trick, but that's the only two norms I can think of off the top of my head.

Maybe I, RobynsVeil, and even Bagginsbill and Snarlygribbly have missed how to programmatically transform materials to more GC friendly versions rather than just replacing them wholesale.  Maybe we've all overlooked some consistent problem to correct, some automatic transformation to perform.  Heck, maybe AI programming is way better (and I know it's really good) and more affordable than I know.

I just don't think any of that is true.

So, for the situation you seem to be saying further Poser development might achieve (materials working with GC onwhile still having the same or similar look as their non-GC version), I think (I don't know, but I think), will require materials made by people who are comfortable making materials. 

Maybe I'm totally misunderstanding the average Poser user, but I think the average Poser user is dependent on content creators and not interested or prepared to create content themselves.  Maybe that's an assumption, but I thought it was a fairly safe one.  I don't have an emotional stake in the answer, frankly.  I think it's great either way.  But I figure it's safer to assume people won't make content themselves and be wrong about that, than to assume they will and be wrong about that.

I am not stating that people in general need to use linear workflow in general or GC specifically.  I am not saying that content creators have to use it.  I am saying that I don't think Poser's programmers or average users can do anything about the existing materials (or lights, for that matter)  that don't work well with GC.  I think that the only way to make lots of content work with GC is for content creators to make new, GC friendly content.  I am not saying people need GC friendly content in general, in case that's what you were thinking. 

I'm truly sorry if what I've written is "garbledygook" to you, but I've really tried to be as clear as possible.  That's why I've written so much.  I don't care about shifting the conversation.  I honestly don't care whether people use GC or not.  As I stated initially, many of my favorite artists don't use it, and produce beautiful works.  I do care, though, if people understand what it is, how it works, and what it changes.   I care that people know the actual limitations of either workflow, as well as what it takes to switch from regular to linear workflows.

I personally never had a big problem switching workflows.  As far as I can tell, that's because I focused on what I was doing, not what I used to do.  Every time either I or other people I know of tried to base linear workflow content on regular workflow content, it was a huge, frustrating PITA.  Thing is, simple stuff works great with linear workflow, so it's not like you have to turn yourself into a material maven or lighting guru to switch.  But it's probably best to either let go of wanting things to look the same as they did before or not switch, because the whole point of switching workflows is to make everything look different.

Quote - LOL. I think that sometimes the evangelists for a new technology are their own worst enemies in that regard.... It's going to take some time for content creators to catch up and until then, things are going to be more compled than ideal I would guess.

Um, I'm not an evangelist for new tech.  I don't know if I would call technology I've been using for four years and learned about from others who were already using it "new" even just to Poser,  but I have literally no stake in how people choose to realize their own artistic vision.  Did you read my post or just react to what you expected it to say?    You said exactly what I did, but without any details about why content creators would need to catch up to make using GC less complex.

Oh, and my works with what I'd consider rich shadows and linear workflow:

Midnight Theatre (I think I actually need make the scenery lighter)

Light Study 07 (deviantART, nudity)

Light Study 06 (deviantART, nudity)

Light Study 05 (nudity)

Light Study 04 (nudity)

Light Study 03 (nudity)

I have another 2 or 3 in the works, as well.   Two need postwork and one needs finishing in Poser.  Using linear workflow has never stopped me from doing low light works. 

I have a major correction to that long-winded post.  I said "All realistic renders incorporate some form of linear workflow," when I meant all realistic renderers.  Totally diffferent.  The point being that if the primary goal of the renderer is realism, then it has some form of correction in general, just because that's more accurate.  The same way such renderers also have caustics and GI.  It's all part of realistic rendering features.  Realistic renders can be made with renderers that aren't optimized for realism, it's just more work for the artist.

Cage, I could totally be off, but I think the development in Poser you're talking about can't happen.  I don't think GC is hard to use for some people because it's not full-featured or developed.  Again, this is just a translation between renderer and sRGB devices.  I mean, yes, it would be nice if certain nodes that are presently included were excluded, or if you had to say whether an input needed to be linearized explicitly with the default being not.  Color_Math, Blender, and EdgeBlend nodes don't quite work properly without protection from GC when they're fed already linearized input.  People work linearly, so it makes more sense to have most of a material work linearly than have most of it treated as if its sRGB.  That said, I don't think that this makes a big difference in most materials.  EZSkin, which everyone uses now, doesn't have protection from this problem and it works fine and everyone loves it. 

I think, unless I'm misunderstanding, the big problem you're talking about is reworking materials made for regular workflow into ones that work the same in linear workflow.  Unfortunately, that's an individual problem, not a universal one.  That is to say, sure, lots of people who have spent ages developing their own look in shading and lighting have had problems converting that shading and lighting to a new workflow.  Unfortunately, that's not a single problem but a large collection of individual problems. 

Again, I could be totally wrong, but I haven't seen a single answer for that.  I've spent a lot of time studying materials- both my own and others'- and I've never seen a consistent approach or look that could be addressed programmatically.  RobynsVeil shared her many and long experiments converting other people's materials to a more accurate and GC-friendly workflow, and it was always a whole lot of trouble and not much reward.   She's more into other stuff now, and I just wholesale replace materials now (and have for a long while).

People mostly made- and make- materials by eyeballing them.  They tried stuff, saw how it rendered, and tried other stuff.  There's not a consistent node combination or behavior to convert.  It's all a bunch of individual kluges that happen to have created a certain look given what is usually a fairly specific set of circumstances.  In my experience, just changing the lighting would often make them behave much differently.

It might be easier to start from scratch, and make an entirely new version that has the same overall goals than to try to force it to have the same specific look and feel as the original.  It also doesn't make sense to try to use GC to change how renders come out but then try to make the render come out the same as it did without GC.  If you liked how it looked originally, then just leave it and save yourself the effort.  Again, it is all about the easiest way to achieve your own artistic goals.

For the general population to use GC comfortably, the big transition that needs to occur is in content creation, not software. Content made to fit linear workflow needs to be available.  In my experience, stuff that looks good with linear workflow looks just fine without it (compared to materials made for regular workflow, that is), but that's just my opinion.