Quote - In the case of the mat room, you need to know how to operate the mouse, how to create nodes, connect them, and set the parameters.

That's about as much as I do know.

I have looked at the material room settings of everything I ever open in Poser, but that hasn't helped me.

Maybe I'm explaining my problem incorrectly.  Let me try again.

In the Material Room there are the following Nodes (well most, I haven't listed all):

Math nodes:

• Blender
• Edge Blend
• Component
• Math Functions
• Color Math
• User Defined
• Simple Color
• Colorramp
• hsv

Lighting:

• Specular
• anisotropic
• phong
• glossy
• blinn
• specular
• Difuse
• clay
• diffuse
• probe light
• toon
• Special
• skin
• velvet
• hair
• fastscatter
• Ray Trace
• reflect
• refract
• ambient occulsion
• gather
• fresnel
• Enviornment Map
• sphere map

3D Textures:

• Fractal Sum
• fBm
• turbulance
• noise
• cellular
• clouds
• spots
• marble
• granite
• wood
• wave3d

2D Textures:

• Wave 2d
• image map
• brick
• tile
• weave
• movie

My problem is that I look at those "node names" and all I see are "node names". They mean absolutely nothing to me. I know that if I go to 2D Textures and pick "Image map", I can use it to browse to a texture and then connect that node to the 1st and 3rd node of the "Poser Surface" panel.

How do I go about learning:

1. What each of those nodes are;
2. When would I use each one of those nodes;
3. What do each of those nodes "do"; what is their purpose in the node world so to speak.
4. How do I learn to know what node to connect to what node and in what order like you have done with those 7 in your second image?

Basically, looking at your second image posted in this thread, I want to know how you knew to:

• make a cloud node
• connect that cloud node to a specular node
• connect that specular node to a math functions node AND to another edge blend node that to me seems to be already part of the string of interconnecting nodes  that is connected to the diffuse color
• connect that math functions node to a colorramp node
• connect that colorramp node to a blender node and then to connect that blender node to the diffuse color node in the poser surface panel AND go onto connect it to a math fuctions node
• connect that math function node to the edge blend node which you already have connected to the specular node

How do you learn to look at that list  of dozens of nodes and know which ones to pick to achieve what you want and how to connect them all together in a proper order to get what you want to achieve?

I keep seeing "simple" and "easy" when it comes to describing those set ups above, but they aren't simple or easy to those of us who are "node dummies".

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi