What I wanna know is, if I use a certain node attached to another node, what is it really doing? What does Exp do different from Max, etc? If wanna do a particular thing, what nodes should I start with? It's easy with some of them, but some are just damned mysterious...lol.

For those of us who have never run across this type of shader system before (and I haven't) sometimes we don't even know how to start..lol. Sometimes it's more satisfying to do it oneself and have it turn out well than have someone else give it to you. I'm not one of those, but that may be where Khai is at. He just wants to understand it, because it's the last part of Poser he hasn't conquered ;). Some folks wanna learn to do it themselves rather than have someone else do it for them.

For what it's worth, Blender's node system makes my head hurt too ;).

Laurie