Use the material/texture/shader of an item on another item?
When I go in the "surface" tab, regardless of the specific item I selected, I can see under "material" a long list of materials from items I have in my library. Which makes me assume that one could apply the material of an item to another different item. But it doesn't seem to work. I can't, for instance, select the skin of a figure and apply to it the material of the skin of another figure (or the material of a piece of clothing on another piece of clothing, etc...). So, let's say that I like the shape of an item A, but like better the external appearance of another item B. Is there a way to apply the material of B on A ?
Similarly, how should I proceed to reuse the texture or shader of an item on another item?
(I guess it's obvious that I don't really have a clue of what a "material" really is)
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It depends. There are different kinds of materials, shader based and image based.
Most likely your figure uses image-based materials, basically there's a picture that wraps around the object. To do this the software needs to know which part of the picture corresponds to each point on the object. Research UV mapping. Thus, these images were designed to only work on the objects they were intended for, which is typically a single generation of figure, like Genesis 1 or Genesis2 or V4 etc. There are a variety of tools that may allow you to convert between generations of figures, I've lost track of what they all are or whether any are built into DS at this point or not, but for example I can generally reuse V4 materials on Genesis as long as I go into the surfaces pane and change the UV mapping to select this.
There are also procedural shader-based materials, that basically are digital "paint" or a pattern that can be applied to whatever you want to apply it to. This would be commonly found in things like metal and stone shaders, etc. There are also image-based shader materials that basically just tile an image over your object. They aren't for a specific object, but some limitations apply depending on what you are trying to apply them to.
To complicate things, "shaders" sold in the store might actually just be a collection of settings for one, so you might need to own the base product for those to work. The product should indicate this though. This does mean not everything is compatible with everything else, and if you use 3DL instead of Iray or the other way around you have to make sure your materials are compatible with whatever render engine you are using.
A Materials Preset goes by Surface names - it has a list of names to affect, with settings for each - so it won't work on an item with diferent names. having different UVs won't stop the material from applying, but may make the results unusable.
A Shader Preset saves the settings for only oen surface, without storing the name, and can be applied to any selected surfaces on any selected models (applying the same settings to each, of course). Again, how good the results look will depend on the mapping.
Can you use the Geometry Editor to change the name of the surface to match the materials original host's surface names?
Yes - switch to the tool then you can just select and double-click the name in the Tool Settings pane.
Thanks for your answers. It didn't help with actually replacing shadders/textures by others, but it did help in understanding (a bit) more how these things work.