If you did this in Poser 5 would it be possible to post a screen shot of your Material room window?

OK, thanks. What does image map 2 look like?

Your bump map should NOT be plugged into the Gradient_Bump Channel - it should be plugged into the Bump Channel and set the value to about .025. The ONLY thing that should be plugged into the Gradient_Bump channel is a *.BUM file - otherwise a grayscale image will cause shading issues with your material. That might not be the actual cause of your problem, but it may be a contributing factor.

No dice. E V S

Is there any other material on the skull besides the Bone material that you are showing?

nope other than preview I am having the same problem with another charcter and I haven't even applied textures or bumps yet. The mesh will whow right throught the diffuse color. E V S

I saw something similar happen once, and it turned out to be splines on the mesh object (splines are lines that have only 2 dimensions). Splines on the mesh will render black, but because they are usually coincidental with the edges of polys of the mesh they only show up when lighting and highlight combime to distinguish them from the surrounding elements. Set your specular color to black and see if they are still visible in a render.

Black Specular = Same results. E V S

OK something is definitely SCREWY. Looking at your materials I can see NO source for the golden color of your material, so your screen shots definitely are missing something. Where is the gold color on the skull coming from?

If the preview color is yellow then it could be that your polys have been assigned to the preview material and the Bone material does noting. OR It could also be that the geometry is duplicated and one set is using preview color and the other is using the bone color. I think the geometry and the mapping are messed up.

Was this by any chance a 3DS model that you imported? If so this might be random polys with reversed normals. You can check with the grouping tool - if the entire surface is red and evenly distributed, the normals are correct. If it is black or blotchy with some black areas, they you have bad polys.

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Sure is hard to tell from what you are showing. Its a bit strange to begin with so hard to tell what is intentional and what is not. Could we see the wireframe (preferably hidden-line or lit wireframe) of the exact camera setting in the image just above? I'm having a problem identifying that "hole"in the skull and its relationship to the "mesh" lines you are getting.

Well, I'm still favoring the polyline/spline theory. I think that you've got some curves in your mesh that don't belong there, and it looks like some non-planar polys or concave polys near that hole. You could bring it into UV Mapper to see the splines and find any bad polys. Just put view wireframe on and be sure to have show backfaces ON also. Go to Select>Select Facets>Degenerate and then hit TAB to see the 3D view - rotate the model if you have splines they will show up as lines without any surfaces. Anyway good luck - this one is a toughie.

Yep - sure does look like some polylines on the mesh to me.

Several thread have pointed out that polygons with more than 4 sides wreaked havoc on Firefly. Do you have the same effect on meshes composed only of quadrangles ?

I dunno. I never use Fire fly. It pisses me off. Too slow and I have a tendancy not to use textures in my characters sso it makes everythign all bulgy. E V S