I have been putting together a large number of MAT pz2's to change mainly the Diffuse colour settings, and each MAT references a Bump map attached to the Gradient bump channel, as well as a reflection node set at 0.1. Also each MAT will update 5 separate items of clothing after each item has been selected and every material zone has a unique name. The bulk of the work has been done in Poser 5. Everything rendered really well and each colour MAT pz2 changes the colours OK and leaves the Bump and reflection channels unaffected. However all the Shader tree info is stored for every Material, and because I wanted one MAT pz2 to change all 5 clothing items the file had grown really large to 480k (I also had another 150 pz2's, including these 22 large pz2's, so in total that's a lot!). So I stripped out all the Shader tree info and other redundant info, leaving just the Diffuse, Ambient and Specular details. This gave a file size of only 6k. So all was great rendering in Poser 5 and changing all the colours using the pz2's would leave the Reflection and Bump settings well alone. Now here's the problem, when I tested in Poser 6 the Bump map and Reflection settings have been removed after using the MAT pz2. I think I have 2 alternatives, put all the shader tree info back or add a Poser 4 style option for the bump map and reflection, which is really not what I was after. Either way it means I have to edit all the pz2's. This is very frustrating, so does anyone have any ideas, whether this is the way for Poser 6 to handle MAT pz2's, which is a bit of bloated approach, or is there any other way I can utilise what I already have. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
Steve

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P6 is stubborn -- all or nuttin. Your better bet, in P6, is to use the P6 Material Collections (which is, essentially, the P6 version of MAT files).

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

Thanks ynsaen. I now realise just how awkward this is now using P6 for what I want. I now have resigned myself into building two versions for my MAT pose files, one for all Poser versions before P6 and a dedicated P6 one. Just when I thought I was almost finished with a product. Ah well another late night is in order. Ta, Steve

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There is a way around it: ShaderSpider by Poseworks. It's sold here or at DAZ, possibly both. Allows you to create files that only change certain parts of a material, while leaving everything else alone. That is the one thing they got absolutely wrong when they added MC6 to Poser 6. Otherwise, they are a worthy successor to MAT poses.

Thanks for the advice about Shader Spider, it's actually available at DAZ. I've got it and it looks like it'll solve all my problems by creating exactly what I need. Ta very much.

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