When we talk about things like rendering realistic human skin, we have to consider that human skin looks the way it does because of several factors including transluscency, moisture content, roughness, AND the most important --- lighting and the interaction between light and the skin - just ask any fashion photographer about the importance of lighting ;-) Now, in the world of 3D meshes, and Poser in particular, we don't have "real" lights that diffuse or bounce light around the scene or "real" skin to interact with it, so we take different approaches to simulate the look of it in a final render. One approach is to concentrate exclusively on the lighting and force that to generate something close to realistic shading on the skin - that is how all the Complex Global lighting sets work. They are very unrealistic lighting models, but they yield a sense of realism in a render because they compensate for the lack of "responsiveness" in the skin material. NOTE - HDRI is a special case, and has its own merits because it is environmentally reactive, but I'm not addressing that here. A different approach is to use a custom shader (like the skin shader in P5) to make the skin "react" naturally to the lighting (rather than making the lighting react to the skin). This approach is diametrically opposed to the Global Lighting approach, and they should NOT be used together. Custom shaders (skin, velvet, clay, blinn, anisotropic etc) ALL are designed to make the material react appropriately to the lighting. They ASSUME that the lighting is conventional, and similar to lighting in the real world. Generally 3 or 4 lights in a scene are all that should be used if you plan on using this type of shader. In the skin render above I am using only 3 lights. Remember that I said there were 4 things that make skin look "real"? Well, in Poser, if we want our skin to look real, we have to address all 4 things 1) Skin texture (roughness) is controlled by bump or displacement mapping). I cannot tell you how important a good bump map is for making decent skin - it is vital. 2) Skin moisture content - mostly affects the highlights and "sheen" and is controlled in the skin shader and in the Specular Channel. Remember though, that the Specular channel is primarily designed for highlights on solid objects (not transluscent objects such as skin) and should be used with care to avoid that "oily plastic" look. 3) Transluscency - for the thin layers of the skin surface it is controlled directly in the Skin Shader (but on a larger scale for things like ears it is controlled by the transluscency channel) - now if we can just get them to make the ears a seperate material zone, I'd be happy. 4) Interaction with lighting - the most important one of all - is controlled by the Skin Shader in combination with lighting placement. I recommend using white light only while you are adjusting your shader materials, then add your lighting "tone" later. Whatever you do, get rid of those damn Poser default lights! They were created for Poser v3, and have never been updated - they are OBSOLETE and no longer enhance the product as they originally did. So if you want realistic skin in P5, you can't just plug in the Skin Node to the Alt Diffuse channel, and expect to get the best results. You must have appropriate lighting and you must make the proper adjustments to the shader parameters. In typical Curious Labs fashion the default parameters of the skin shader are NOT set to optimal values - you will have to make adjustments to get the best results.