This is promted by the new DAZ V3 Catsuit - a very fine piece of clothing, to be sure - which I bought and started playing around with yesterday. Put simply, the MAT pose for Black is not black. It's a very dark grey, but not in this world is it ever black. I have noticed this in several other things, too. The settings are some kind of dark grey, but not ever black. Please, please, pretty please with a cherry on top, if you're gonna provide a MAT for black, make it real, genuine black, you know, all RGB values to zero.

*prompted. Argh, damn my typing.

Well, I don't know about MATs, but I'm definitely with you on black being black. Full black is RGB 0 0 0, not something near it, similar, close to, whatever. It seems that, in Poser, every single color is a derivative of the top left-hand color in the picker (that blech orangy-browny-pink color), including poser's black. And it does make a difference. For instance, if you use 100% transparency, and don't have highlights set to full black, you sometimes get weird reflections. mac

100% black generally sucks for illustration work as you will have no play for shadows, and it tends to leave the model/texture seeming very flat. Having a texture slightly off-black helps keep the depth. Rawnrr

Rawnrr - you're correct, to a degree. However, if you're using different highlights and so forth, the depth will be apparent. Think of shiny black leather and so forth. The DAZ catsuit looks washed out with the "Black" MAT but looks much better with real black.

I tend to use full black to kill highlights, but I NEVER use full black for Ambient Color. In that, I agree with rawnrr. Messing around with ambient in the warm brown area is the best way to get nice skin tones. mac