Can anyone explain to me why this effect is happening when i apply a bmp file to V3 head part? I get nasty black lines in the creves of her face...i.e. Eyelids, nose around mouth and eyebrows...The bmp file is set to 0.1 and when i turn it up the problem gets worse the black lines get larger...when i take off the bmp file the problem dissappears...there is nothing wrong with the bmp file i made it was made from the tex file and isnt particulary strong. I applied the file in the materials room in poser surface bump. Not Gradient. And used one light to speed up rendering to test it out. The light used ray traced shadows and the firefly enging used ray tracing. poser 5 has the latest SR3.

I have increased the shadow min bias and no effect!

Does this still happen if you do not use ray tracing? What is your source image? In P5 a bump strength of 0.1 is VERY high (0.001 to 0.03 is the average range), particularly if your bump source image has anything other than a black background, such a high setting may cause a problem. This also could be a displacement issue, so try it with displacement turned off and a lower bump strength and see what happens.

I did what you asked and rendered without raytracing and turned down the bmp on the poser surface to 0.03. This is the result! Still black bits around corners of mouth and in eye lid cracks. The bmp on her skin looks like it isnt there at all.

Just curious if you've tried saving it as a JPEG instead of as a BMP and see if Poser reads it in differently. Also, perhaps the UVs don't quite line up with the template in those areas. Did you try filling in the extra areas of the map around there with middle gray?

Or perhaps the way you made the map created strong blacks or whites at those exact spots? Since you don't need any bumps there, maybe touch up the map in that area to fade that area down to middle gray?

At this point it looks like the shadow Min Bias is too high. It sould be between 0.8 and 0.3 for most things, and even as low as 0.15 when a shadowcasting item is very close to the object receiving the shadows. I can't tell for sure, but there might be something strange with the bump map - are you sure that it is not a BUM file?. BUM files (the ones that look like embossed images) should only be used in the Gradient Bump node. Could you post a small section of the bump file as an image here?

It's ok now...I figured out to use the jpeg bmp file on her face very well with no nasty black lines...I stuck it in the displacement node with a setting of 0.02 and it works fine!