This is a question that I've been thinking about the past week or so.  I dabble a little in creating things in hex and importing them into poser and it made me think.  Are there any sort of naming conventions for making it easier to set up a scene for bill's VSS shader and if there aren't should we come up with them?

Let's say I'm doing an interior house scene.  I've got mats named walls, trim, crown molding, kick molding, door, door frame, window frame, and window trim that are all going to get my satin paint finish mk III mat.  Now it's a bit of work to manually add all the names and the objects and it would be a bit easier to use paint or paint 1 and paint 2.  Another example is if I'm doing a NVIATWIAS scene and I've got 7 stone props, each with a different name and a different mat name... like a stone wall mat, a pillar mat, and a stair mat.  It's be nice if they'd all start with something like stone.  Plus I've got 2 swords all with a blade, hilt, and pommel which should be using the same basic metal shader, it'd be nice if I could just use metal.

I realize there could be some flaws, but does anyone else think that this might be a good idea?

I've thought about this. It's an interesting question. For humans, the fact that any zone named "skin" (i.e. what it's made of) is useful - and makes the default rules (put Template Skin in skin) work great.

On the other hand, naming what it is, not what it's made of, has advantages for things like buildings, rooms.

I've been dabbling in constructing rooms, and I have a few Template shaders I use quite often. It's been very advantageous that I say "Living Room Wall" or "Kitchen Wall" versus "Paint" or "Plaster". If the wall is called "Plaster", how do I get VSS to know to use the Wall Template shader, which currently happens to be a green glass, because that is what I want walls to be made of?

How about an accent wall, where I want that to be a different color? Does it make sense to call it "Red Wall Paint" when I actually want it made of blue stucco? The name "Accent Wall" makes more sense for use with VSS.

But ultimately, the notion of rule-based shader assignments was just something I did for quick and dirty support of common figure material zone names. If I ever would get around to it, I'll make a drag and drop GUI for VSS. Then the names simply will not matter. You'll grab zones and make zone groups. Then you'll grab a material (shader) and drop it on a zone group. It will be so much easier.

Quote - It's been very advantageous that I say "Living Room Wall" or "Kitchen Wall" versus "Paint" or "Plaster".

Yeah that's similar to one of the things I was thinking of in terms of problems.  The best I could come up with is having a system where it would be wall(n) with n being a number or (material) - piece where you could key in on the material in general and use the full name for the exceptions.  But then you're always having to remember what number stands for what or still doing a lot of work.

However drag and drop sounds like a good plan... it's simple and easy to use.