Material Style sheets advantages in lighting

[art3mis]

Although MSS can't be used on cameras or lights my understanding is that they are still advantageous to lighters.

I  believe this has something to do with the inheritance chain (attached)

Can someone describe an actual scene or scenario in which this might be true?
 

[davpe]

i use MSS all the time. it is extremely handy for material overrides, for example (when you have more mantra nodes and each of those apply a different style sheet), or if you want to render packed primitives, MSS makes it easy to assign materials without having to unpack the geometry (so very heavy scenes can be kept relatively lightweight). also, there are several videos online that show how to do quite complex material setups for crowds. in general for scenarios where you have a lots of objects to which you wanna apply the same general look but with variations, MSS are great. all of these things can be worked around to get the result but MSS sort of unifies the workflow and I'd say it also makes it easier to do. another thing is that it allows easy sharing between scenes as it is a json script that can be exported into text file and also edited as a text file if you wish - very cool for big projects. plus it offers more functionality i haven't even discovered yet.