ok, first, set your reflection color to WHITE, that gray will be making it quite dark, secondly change your Highlight size to .5 or less. also, try changing your camera angle, render the object from different sides, one thing you may not have considered is that the part of the sphere map that is being rendered on the surface you are looking at may have no details, and therefore, not show up. try applying your material to a sphere, and rendering that the problem with sphere maps is that it "Stretches" it over the surface of the object, flat areas (especially those directly facing the camera) have a small section of the sphere map stretched right across a larger suface, losing the detail (sometimes all of it) from the sphere map. http://stupes.customer.netspace.net.au/templargfx.zip here is zip file with my complex materal above. simply unzip it to your POSER directory. (make sure you use directories) then in material room you should find a materal called templargfxmetal apply this to your object, then under image_map select the imagemap you are using at the moment

TemplarGFX
3D Hobbyist since 1996
I use poser native units

167 Car Materials for Poser