After Poser 7 is released and with all those free copies of Poser 5 out there, I wonder if we will see the tide start to turn and see more and more use of advanced features such as the material room in the products released?

I know this comes up all the time - but even a lot of the EF content is still not taking advantage of the material room settings - it would be interesting to see exactly what percentage of the market is actually just PP stuff with the bump map in the right channel.

I would most likely buy more merchandise if it took advantage of the P5 / P6 features

I see some hope as DAZ has dropped the P4 / PP ? requirement from it's products - at the risk of upsetting some people - surely now is the time to move on - after all there is nothing worse than having to delete all those P4MAT, PPMAT and rsr files then missing one and accidently clicking on a P4 MAT file and watching Poser go off hunting for a bum file....

But then again - maybe the need for Merchants to be compatiable with D|S will hold back content development ?

I hope that P4 and P5 will no longer be sold next year and MAT poses die soon after that...

"...maybe the need for Merchants to be compatiable with D|S will hold back content development ?" Possibly to some extent. That's the problem with proprietary solutions. The few procedural shading apps I've seen all seem to use the same general functions so it would be great if there were a universal format. I think I read that the new Vue will support Poser's shaders though so that's a plus.

Quote - I hope that P4 and P5 will no longer be sold next year and MAT poses die soon after that...

Speaking as the creator/discoverer of MAT poses, I agree 100% with this statement :)

There are only a couple of things that MAT poses did that MC6 files cannot, and those can be addressed either as requests to e Frontier, hopefully to be included in a future version of Poser, or to our Python gurus (which would obviously yield faster results, due to less overhead). Also, since Poser no longer supports those functions (changing only the texture in a complex material setup, for example), there is no need for MAT poses with Poser 5/6/7.

Actually, MAT poses are still needed for P5 since they can't do complex setups with multiple zones. It only has one area. For example you can't  do head and body in the same MC5 or even head and scalp. At least how I understand it.

Yep, P5 needs MAT poses and it's the last version of Poser that does.  That's why I join Dizzi and R_Hatch in hoping EF stops selling it soon.  I've finished a couple of projects recently where including P5 support really created a lot of extra effort.  I think continued availability of P5 is going to be the main thing holding the content market back once P4 is gone.  If it were my decision, I'd tell EF to drop every version of Poser except Poser 7 the day it comes out.

So that was you that came up with MAT poses, R_Hatch?  I've often wondered who that was.  I can't think of a single Poser discovery that has had such a far-reaching effect as that one.

Quote - So that was you that came up with MAT poses, R_Hatch?  I've often wondered who that was.  I can't think of a single Poser discovery that has had such a far-reaching effect as that one.

'Specially on our Poses Directory - I would guesstimate that my Poses directory would be about 1/3 of it's present size if I removed all the MAT files.

BTW - some interesting comments expressed in this thread - it's nice to know I'm not alone and I look forward (hopefully) to seeing more content with .mc6 files (or whatever they be called in Poser 7)

To be honest, |'m in two minds about P5, but the way the price keeps jumping up it's soon not going to be much of a saving. If there's going to be a new "Poser Artist", I reckong P6 should be it. I reckon it could as easily have been P5.5 if it hadn't been for the change of ownership. And the freebie/ultra-cheap release has maybe put enough copies out there that it needs some support. But it's pretty easy to take an MC6 and turn it into a MAT pose. As for the MAT pose features that have stopped working, I can't say I've noticed anything that uses them. It sounds the sort of thing which feels too clever by half.

Quote - As for the MAT pose features that have stopped working, I can't say I've noticed anything that uses them.

You used to see lots of them, even in DAZ products.  They did things like change bump strength while leaving other settings alone, or turn transparency on and off, so you could see hair textures while you adjusted them, then turn on transparency when you were ready to render.  People stopped making them after Poser 5 came out, because they only worked in Poser 4.

It's easy enough to change an mc6 into a MAT pose, but Poser 5 doesn't have as wide a range of nodes as Poser 6 so for advanced materials you have to actually change the node set up itself, which is no fun at all.  Also, no matter how easy it is to make a material collection into a MAT pose, it's a total pain having to update two separate sets of files every time you decide you need to tweek the bump strength or something. 

Just to show how ingrained the MAT file mindset has become - I was actually asked by a tester at a store as to why I had a different set of poses for both P5 and P6 (I had included MAT files for the P5 and a mcz for Poser 6)

There just doesn't seem to be the knowledge out there of the differences in available node settings between P5 and P6.