what is this exactly ? Do I need it considering theP5material room is great although a bit cumbersome ? How does it work??? what is it for? Can I use clothing figures in it ???

I think you can use clothing in it. The newsletter says you get the V3 ultra catsuit free if you buy it. (Of course, I already bought the catsuit, so that doesn't do me any good.) It sort of implies you can use it on the catsuit.

I am thinking of buying it. With the introductory discount and the PC discount, it won't be too bad. I would like to be able to change all skin colors at once, as this allows you to do. If you're changing skin tones on the Millennium figures, there are a lot of things to change. Head, scalp, hands, neck, etc. It's kind of a pain to get the colors matched sometimes. This would allow you to change everything with one click.

And of course, there's DAZ's 30-day money-back guarantee. If I don't like it, I can always get my money back. OTOH, it is a DAZ original. It will likely go on sale in the future, for less than it costs now. Possibly when I have vouchers to spare. Do I really need it now? Decisions...

looks like something that no one really "needs", but rather a useful tool to buy that can save a bit of time once you have finished purchasing everything else :) Wait a bit of time and it'll probably end up in Daz's PC for $1.99

"Wait a bit of time and it'll probably end up in Daz's PC for $1.99" Ack! You're doing a good job of talking me out of it. :-P

hey, I'm not saying that will be soon but I get the feeling that anything that is a Daz Origional will sooner or later end up in the Platinum Club. Basically I just think this is a product that doesn't do anything you can't do yourself, it just speeds up some processes. With luck someone who has bought it can give an opinion on if it's worth the high price it has.

I hate that when it happens... prices usually do go down sooner or later. The p5 mat room is a pain, especially with so many material zones on the millenium figures. It may be worth the PC price of $25..I have no vouchers right now, but through in the V3 catsuit which I never bought, you're actually ahead $5... so I guess its a pretty good deal :) But..do I need it ???? anyone have this yet and can describe its functions ???

that "through" word should have been THROW

I really don't see the need for so many material zones. If one wants to turn off bits of, say, the catsuit, it's just as easy to use a transmap and more flexible. It means that trying to make a new texture for something in Poser 4 is a nightmare, as you have to set up every last material zone separately.

I haven't found the material room that cumbersome. I can copy and paste without all that much trouble or taking that much time. Overall I'm in the group who would like to hear from someone who has purchased it and used it and see what they think. I also already bought the catsuit. Sigh.

kinda like buying a defrag utility when windows already has one ?

If you haven't bought the catsuit, I think this would be a great deal. I love the Ultra Catsuit. Very useful item. But since I already have the catsuit, I'm still thinking about it. Just the time saved in changing skin tones might be worth it for me. I often do fantasy skin tones like sky blue or purple, and that takes a lot of trail and error to get right. And copying and pasting doesn't work very well for that.

I kinda like having more material zones. I was actually thinking of adding that to the pixie pack today, after someone mentioned making gloves and pants for him. while making different complte body textures does work, and is more flexible, just selecting a material part and changin it is much easier for some things. I have no problem at all using the material room, and really don;t understand what this new material manager can do to make it easier.

"just selecting a material part and changin it is much easier for some things" But for others it makes things much more onerous, especially for P4 users.

Well I'm glad that everyone else seems about as confused as I am about the need for this proggie. Like randym77said: "If you haven't bought the catsuit, I think this would be a great deal." Since I do have the Catsuit,I think I'll just get BlueBeards "Lace for V3 Ultra CatSuit" for $6.25 as I planned. Not only does the lace in the set look beautiful (per usual), it's suppose to help get control of the Catsuit's many material zones through Pose files and from what I've heard works fantastic. Think that's enough for me.

I bought the program and it works great....so long material room!...with all the PC club discounts and the voucher it ran less than $20..only got it today but made some MAT Poses for some V3 textures I had laying around...worth it ...for the price I paid, I think so

There is a statement, unless I read it incorrectly, that this thin MAPS a figure... and, again, unless I misunderstood, you can use textures and stuff made for different figures and this basically remaps the figure to accept these other textures ???? or am I way off here.

Does the program handle P5 material settings? The promo makes no mention of P5. If it can be used to apply shader nodes, it's something I'd find useful. Otherwise...hell, I can make MAT poses in notepad.

The video tutorial goes a bit fast but it's pretty informative. It's a 6meg mov (quicktime)file.

ok..I watched the tut...but what does it do that I can't do in P5 mat room ??? That copy paste thing can be done for sure...plus applying the transparency and stuff.... what else does this do for us ??? where's the author?

diolmaBM

I'm having a hard time to justify buying this. I have the V3 catsuit as well, not much of an incentive to buy. Now if it was the SP3 cat suit, I would think about it.

RandC: "....so long material room!..." ??????????? The material room also has the amazing world of the nodes where you create textures on the fly. Doesn't seem possible the material manager does that. I like my nodes. I don't know how to use them very well. But I like them.

I'm trying to figure out if I need that V3 catsuit. I still can't figure out exactly what this MM is doing, or what it is supposed to be doing overall... It does seem like a great product for Poser4/PP, however.

I bought it. I still haven't had a chance to play with it, but I figure I have nothing to lose by giving it a try. Since I like to play with funky fantasy skin colors, it would be worth it to me to be able to change all the skin parts to one color with the click of a mouse, then create a MAT file that would work on all Millennium figures.

From reading the promo material, except for swapping materials on the fly (which can be done in Poser anyway) this doesn't seem to do anything more than MAT Pose Edit v3.1 which is FREE. In fact, it doesn't appear to do even half what MPE 3 can do. It is unclear whether it can read complex P5 shader nodes and write MATs for them, but I'll bet it doesn't or they would be boasting about that in their advertising. By the way, I've bought several Poseworks products from DAZ and I must say, BUYER BEWARE - the products are shoddy and they offer NO support whatsoever. If you write to DAZ about it, they just bounce you around till you give up. I think I'll pass on this one.

Where do you find Mat Pose Edit? Thanks, Marque

Attached Link: Mat Pose Edit Home

Thanks so much! Marque

It can't handle P5's nodes. At least, I couldn't find any way of adding nodes to the MAT poses. And when I tried creating them in the Material room and saving them using Material Manager, it just ignored them. You can see that in the image. I had a skin shader node applied to the face of Vicky 3, which is why her face is a slightly different shade from her body. There are also glossy speculars applied to her lips and eyes that were not included in the MAT pose when I applied it to preschool boy.

OTOH, it does create MAT poses that work fairly well on all Millennium figures. I made a MAT pose on Vicky 3 (on the left), and applied it to preschool boy (on the right), and it worked fairly well. Just eyes and eyebrows didn't work. And it sure is nice, being able to change the entire body of the figure to one color with the click of a mouse.

Actual operation is a little bit buggy, probably because of Poser 5's helpful "feature" of retaining material settings even after you change them.

Like I said, I'm trying to decide if this is worth $25 or not. Being able to color whole figures with the click of a button is nice, as is being able to create MAT poses that work on all Millennium figures. (You never know when you'll have to make an entire family of blue aliens or something. ;-) But I'm not exactly blown away here. For this kind of money, I kind of expected support for things like skin shaders and speculars.

P5 nodes are tricky for any external app to handle because the complete shader tree does not actually reside in memory all the time so there is no way to edit or modify it on the fly by scripts or MAT Poses. The only part that P5 keeps in memory is the Poser Surface Node. The rest of the tree is dynamically generated at render time, and when making changes in the material room. This is the reason that most shaders don't show any effect other than basic color in the preview window. It is also why it sometimes "appears" that poser is retaining old material settings when in actuality it is just not being properly instructed by the MAT pose. There IS a way to force P5 to update the whole tree on the fly, but that's a complicated story best left to a tutorial.

Guess I'll have to stick with Netherworks' Poser 5 MAT Writer Python script for P5 MATs. Looks like P5 is still a red-headed stepchild as far as DAZ is concerned...

You're right about that - Netherworks' Poser 5 MAT Writer Python script is about the only reliable way I know of to get the complete shader tree into a MAT Pose file. After you get the initial tree into a MAT, MPE3 works great at editing the basic material parts in the Poser Surface node without disturbing the rest of the tree.

The Python API is in P5 is pretty much the same as in PP i.e. there is no Python access to Cloth, Hair (except the geometry) and Material Nodes, so unless you roll your own by parsing files, these are inaccessable to scripting. There are probably good reasons why such access wasn't added but it's a shame all the same.

If anyone's wondering, I gave up on Material Manager. Deleted it from my computer and asked for a refund. They were very nice about it, and returned my $$$, no questions asked.

If it really did let you "shift on the fly," I might have kept it. But it didn't. It would look as if the colors had changed, but if you rendered, the old colors would be there. Or if you went into the Material Room to add some nodes, DOINK! The old colors would come back. The only way to make the new colors stick and actually render was to make a MAT pose, save it, and apply it. That being the case, I decided I might as well just use MAT Pose Edit and Poser 5 MAT Writer for free.

Thank you all for the posts here guys :) I had been wondering about the nodes and had been staring at this thing... but after viewing that absolutely ATROCIOUS video (Which put me off nearly completely) and the fuzzy popups where I saw no mention of nodes... No WAY. This should really apply to P4 only. It shouldn't even go NEAR P5. I know a lot of people dislike P5, but dayum... you can do some pretty amazing stuff with those nodes if you fiddle a while. Now that I've discovered the difference the shader nodes make to a render, there is no way I go back to non-noded renders. This thing doesn't support them, so there ain't no way it hits my HDD. As for the "it'll be at $1.99 soon" - I bought the high fantasy stuff when it came out. If I hadn't spotted a post by someone in the forum I'd never even known I had some vouchers (which will likely expire as usual as there is nothing I can buy with them) were in my account. Yep, I'm getting pretty cheesed with Daz atm, as well as their refusal to support P5.

I'm with you about P5 support. They did finally release the Power Pixie in his native P5 setup, and I'm glad of that. I spent quite a bit of time arranging folders in the various boart parts for the morphs, to make him easier to use, and that would have been stripped if he had become Daz only. Oh, and another stupid P5 trick? Rendering shadows WITHOUT rendering a groundplane! Someone figured that out over at RNDA. Yet another FREAT feature not possibl ni P4... no more faking the shadows!

Actually, Garree, it was posted here first, and credit goes to Stewer. :) Got a shader that does something cool? Drop on by the P5 Forum at www.runtimedna.com and share it. While you're there, bookmark the node by node thread -- you'll love it...

Glad you can remember all that stuff! ;)