Hi Paramount,

adding content from all that mostly lovely freebies (and some paid articles) is the most time consumptive task ever ... :mad:
But on other hand I find it useful to have all ready on disk instead of searching through zip-files for thing's that might be there ... or there ... or somethere ...

One most important tip ... never, never, never unpack anything directly to your well structured and working runtime(s). Everytime have a emtpy runtime structure at hand and unpack to that. Then look through and get rid of all that licence, promo, readme, etc. stuff. In most cases it gives you no or non long lasting advices. In my experience to archive it is waste of diskspace. OK, if you want to be legal in all case of distributing freebies or even images you have to try to hold that licence stuff in archive ready to be found if needed. But I have not found a way to do this with consistence and reliability ... we are talking about hobby and there I never found the way to do such administration wether for my books, photographs or other things ...

With that included zip it's most easy. This attaching seem's to ignore zip-file. So I added .txt to the original zip file as last extension. Delete this by renaming in windows explorer and you should end with a zip-file (made by winzip) which should bring no problem to all unzippers (e.g. stuffit) which are valid working with zip-files.
The pz3-scene file in that zip can be placed where ever you want. Other than CR2 or such PZ3 is not specific to the poser structure's for it's own place. OK, the parts included in the pz3 should stay at their correct location inside the poser runtime structure. But in this case thats all the standard positions.
If you have XP or higher and the XP included zip-service (which I personelly have shot to the moon cause being rubbish from my point of view) you should be able to drag and push the pz3 to a folder of your choice. No need for a poser specific unpacker.

If you need tutorials to neary almost of the poser topics try
Dr. Geep's poser university (drgeep.com/NPU/NPUWelcome.htm) a really funny but informative place.

As a library to lot's of material room topics have a look to
Acadia's collection, here under www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

And as a basic tut of node basic's try this www.castleposer.co.uk/my_tutorials.html
Though written for Poser 5 (I believe) it's correct for all following versions.

Roughly in short:
Shader normally mean's one specific material in whole for one material group (a defined group og polygons). Technically (since Poser 5) it's implemented as a shader tree with the ever existing root node ... the poser basic material seen top left in the material windows in extended version. To each of it's channels, parameter dials or color fields, you might combine additional nodes. Normally each of this again have channel's for taking nodes. The purpose of the node defines what possibilities are given. In theory as far as I know there is no limit combining nodes. In practise at some far point poser will explode but at a much much nearer point it makes no more sense cause all these nodes need'S processor power in render calculation.
So there is a point your render would never end in a reasonable time.

Procedural in this context mean's that the shader is build (mostly) by nodes and mathematical formulas to simulate the look and feel of a real material. The opposite would be a texture map, a image given as jpg or else, giving the color and look of the material. In this case the render engine "only" need's to spead that image according to the U-V-coordinates of the polygon mesh. And of course such image maps can be combined with procedural parts in the shader tree.  Huh, so easy while so complicated ... :biggrin:

That stuff can be made very mathmatical, academic, ... or seen as a big playground changing a bit here and a bit there and to see the outcome. Only I would prefer to have a better (bigger) preview  window. It's a little bit annoying with each small, smallest change to have a testrender (even if only partly) to get a view to the result.

Have a nice 4. Advent ...
Jo