Hi everyone, I am working on some new props for Poser and I have some questions: Do MAT files made in Poser 4 work well or at all in Poser 5? If there are problems, are there workarounds? Thanks for any help, Jacqueline

Yes, P4 MAT files will work in P5, with a few caveats:

P5 has both ambient colour and ambient value channels; P4 only has ambient colour. P4 MATs that rely on ambient tricks will only set the colour, and not the strength, in P5. By default, Ambient_Value is 0 (off).

P4 MATs with bump maps will, in P5, automatically attach the bump file to the material's Gradient_Bump channel, rather than the regular bump channel.

Other than that, they work fairly well.

MAT Pose Edit 3 supposedly can create P5 MAT files, but I haven't tried that feature myself yet. I don't know if the MATs it generates include all the additional P5 channels.

MAT Pose Edit 3 will make sure that the bump map is connected to the proper channel and that the bump strength is set correctly. I've tried it and it works pretty good, it even has a batch convert functionality that lets you update all your old MAT files (you can even chose between creating new copies or overwrite the old files). Many products have separate MAT files for P5 that loads a jpg bump map instead of the old .bum file from Poser 4. However, Poser 5 will usually still connect it to the Gradient_Bump channel, resulting in no bump effect in FireFly renders (FireFly ignores the Gradient_Bump channel). All DAZ products behaves this way. In those cases, the above trick with MAT Pose Edit comes in handy.

Yes, MPE 3.1 will ALSO fix some other problems such as highlight size and transparancy falloff in the process. A lot of thinking went into the converter, and it really does the job right, creating a fully compliant P5 shader tree and not just a P4 MAT that happens to work in P5 - it's the real thing.