One of the things I found out is that Poser materials by default have zero ambience. So when a surface is not directly struck by light, it'll be pitch black. In the "real" world, there's a lot of indirect lighting. On a sunny day, the obvious light source is the sun. But objects in shadow are still clearly visible, they're lit by light that's reflected by surrounding objects. A quick and dirty way to simulate indirect lighting is plugging the texture map into the ambience color input in addition to the diffuse color input. Set ambience color to something between the color of your main light and white, set ambience value to about 0.4 and set diffuse value to about 0.6. Voila, your shadows come alive. P.S: the Gather node actually gathers lighting information from objects that are near. Unfortunately you'll have to crank up the amount of data collected to insane values to have a smooth effect, and render times will approach infinity.... And Ambient Occlusion is also a key to realism. Shadow maps just don't get the detailed shadows between fingers, or that slight shadow effect from the edges of clothing on skin. AO does. If you want to see what can be done with Poser 6 regarding realism, search for Mec4D in the forums. Pretty impressive results straight out of Poser.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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