I looked in the Material room, and it's a mess, with naked columns of numbers lying about, laps of connections and some nodes and the Poser Surface window float away when I try to move them.  I looked in one of the MAT poses with a text editor and some of the node positions are in the billions.  Is there a way to easily return these values to something reasonable without having to edit Poser files by hand? 

Crikey!

How about just looking what texture files are used and then starting afresh.

I generally replace all chrome, glass, car paint, leather, plastic, steel and rubber materials with my own variants anyway. BB has free shaders for all that stuff - they might have more nodes than your model has polys, but they look decent and render pretty quick.

I am intrigued, what model is this? 

And how did it get past a quality control check?

I was looking to see if I could plug in some BB shaders, Cap'n, and I found this when I went to the Material Room. 

It's this VW...

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/volkswagen-beetle-1963/95779

I have a couple of high poly cars that render quickly with BB's paint shaders.  On this one the wheels are over 45,000 polys each; thank goodness the spare isn't modeled.

a python script could reposition them all.   I dont know if they ever put in a command to arrange nodes in rows

thank goodness the spare isn't modeled.

Hahahahahahaha!

And as for the original question, I think BB has made over a hundred posts that contain the words: "shaders", "vendors" and "ignorance".

And thankfully I'm quite happy with the free Beetle I picked up at dmi.

It works on only the current material.

It will collapse all inputs and previews so each node is just a little box.

It also arranges them in columns and rows. 5 nodes per column  unless theres lots of nodes  and then it puts them in 5 columns and what rows are needed.

Note: this is not intelligent but a brute force arrangement. It should however bring every node into view for you to rearrange as needed. 

It doesnt change the mat pose so you would have to run it every time , or save the result as a material or collection.

Quote - here is a script that may help. It was done in Poser 7. 

It works on only the current material.

It will collapse all inputs and previews so each node is just a little box.

It also arranges them in columns and rows. 5 nodes per column  unless theres lots of nodes  and then it puts them in 5 columns and what rows are needed.

Note: this is not intelligent but a brute force arrangement. It should however bring every node into view for you to rearrange as needed. 

It doesnt change the mat pose so you would have to run it every time , or save the result as a material or collection.

That's great!  Now I can see what's going on in the shader.  Thanx! 

I think one of Snarly's scripts will reposition and line up material room nodes.  Haven't tried it yet, though.  They do like to jump around a bit, the mat nodes.

Happy New Year, Cage!

In Snarly's Scene Fixer there is a sort button on the rename Node Names section, but it doesn't seem to affect the actual nodes, although I didn't try renaming any.  The huge values are of similar magnitude, in the vicinity of 4294967000, so it may have been done deliberately (or else the artist has a honking big monitor! :lol: )

I haven't yet hooked up the bump maps for the tire sidewall lettering, but replacing the stock glass, chrome and paint shaders with BB's shaders reduced the render time fro being 3/4 finished when I killed it after an hour and six minutes to 6 minutes 11 seconds.  It's a really good looking model...

But IMO DAZ' 55' Econo Car is still the most accurately shaped Volkswagen Beetle out there.

:-)

w, I ain't seen that error screenshot before.  maybe remove detached nodes, unless somebody already said that.  millions of materials is no good, tho.  they sometimes get that when each polygon is a material group.