Logically w ought to represent how colour (or whatever other texturing parameter you choose) changes as you move away from the surface of the object. Your standard uv map is a 2D slice of 3D uvw space and that 2D slice is painted on the surface of the object, so what happens as you move w away from 0 is that you are also moving away from the surface of the object. Since most 3D apps only render the surface of the object (the exceptions being things like volumetric rendering), there's usually no need to know what the colour is like away from the surface and that's why w usually isn't used - combined with the fact that you'd need a three dimensional input to do it and uv(w) mapping is almost always associated with flat picture textures (such as jpeg images) where there's no third dimension information coming from the texture. Procedural textures are genuinely three dimensional, but they don't need a uvw mapping because they just use the identity mapping (xyz maps to xyz). For things like displacement mapping, the usual technique is to take the brightness of a point on the 2D texture and use that as an indicator of how much to move the surface of the model. The direction of movement is taken to be the surface normal at that point, so although displacement mapping looks like it should be related to the w coord, they're actually not related at all. Basically the w coord is only used when an object contains renderable volume and even then you would probably be better off using a procedural textures. That's what I meant about it not being very useful. Poser still doesn't do volumetric objects and even if it does in future, I doubt it will use the w coord. Wow, you shure have a lot of math nodes there. I suppose you have to for any sort of even vaguely decent equation. I'll guess you used displacement to hollow out the ground, though you might have used a deformer if the ground plane has enough mesh for it.

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