This is a very good idea! I am putting it on my list on things I might do this spring. Generally my products are done primarily for Poser, but they are made to work for DS as well.

In that case, jpgs are probably not the most optimal format for opacity maps? An 8bit (for leaves even lower) tga would probably be better, and turn off texture filter in the material. With a lot of leaves in a scene, any optimization counts, if it -does- have an impact on the result. I may run some benchmark renders, but I am on the hunt on things to work with for it.

Yeah its mostly leaves and things like that. I mostly wonder if bit depth of grey scale opacity impacts render speed

Both for vendors and customers, this is not the easiest balance to strike. Some are hobby artists and sell on their spare time, for others, it's their sole livelihood. What's a fair price depends on so many factors, like size of the product (variety, number of props in a scene, morphs, textures etc), and quality/detail, versatility, not to mention how much work there is involved to produce it.

It's only one material zone, and multiple UV islands. The strange thing is that I get no bump at all, even if I turn the values to extreme settings, (Settings that make it look insane in 3Delight) I am a bit new with this program, as I am making items better compatible with DS, from Poser, which is where I do most of the work first.

Well it sure looks better now. With black you mean the empty space between UV islands right? And with gamma, the gamma setting in the render options?

Looks like the channels are right too (Right angles) I tested it with a single lightsource to be sure Now it's time to move forward to more baking and texture cleaning. Thanks for the help :)

This looks very feasible and simple. I will try with this and see how it goes! If successful, I'll post some results here with renders and screenshots of material settings for benefit of the community. You rock as usual, thanks!

So it does seem I can do it. I am not so interested in "random" blends though, but a more organized one. I'd like to paint a black and white texture on the UV map, and keep it at the original scale, using it to separate the two textures. (Like a trail cutting through a landscape mesh) It looks doable. In your example though, either the black/white connections of the cloud node would be used, or a blender. Is it the blender I need to use, if I use a black and white image map?

I am also wondering if it would be possible to blend more than two images in a material. Seems I am going to delve deep into the world of Poser materials...

Hmm, that is interesting. So in theory I could combine any textures with that method, and use pretty much anything as a mask for it?

This looks absolutely amazing.  Both a user and long time creator and vendor of dynamic clothing, this plugin is a definite must when it comes out. :)  Is it possible to sign up somewhere for updates, or do I just follow this thread?

Lots of drama about nothing..  Poser conversions are coming already with partial success.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/58208/#845962

A deeply invested community tends to be self regulating..  Things have worked out for most platforms so far. Give a little time. :)

Actually, I am not generating the displacement/normal map from a 2D map.  It's a 3d scanned ground plane, which means it has high resolution geometry information.  It turns out though that just rendering the depth map information was what was needed. 

I might try it with the Right camera, but as you say, displacement map may work better, and it was super easy to make too, from the 3d scanned model.

Ah thank you for the explanation, Bagginsbill!  I will either drop normal maps for this project then or use different software, like Xnormals for it.  I suspected it was not creating proper normal maps, but I wanted to understand better what was going on. Thanks for the quick reply. :)

I looked through the thread that you posted vilters, and I got it. :) The trick to using the blender node seems to not just split and use the two images, but also use the blending connection and value to max, to filter with the transparancy. 

Thanks for the help!