**My hair keeps doing this in my renders...anyone have this happen too??? Is there a better setting? HuggerZ! Ariana

Smooth Poly's
Gaussian is on 2
Raytrace is on 2
Minimum Shading is on 0.50
Pixal samples on 3
Max Texture 3000
** 

Turn texture filtering off. And do the min shading rate to .02 on render settings.

I'd lose the Gaussian as well. Probably don't need 2 raytrace bounces either - 1 should suffice.

And if those don't help enough, also lower shading rate to .2.

shading rate of 0.02 might be a waste of resources for this image, but give it a try. at least 0.2, anyway. in the old days, it was simpler - one would just "anti-alias" the image, but that was seen as too physically simplistic, so they dropped that terminology for ray-trace renders. but it's a bummer when folks say to turn bounces down to 1 IMVHO. not that it matters in this example (more than 1 bounce would be a waste of resources here), but that is one of the reasons (in addition to giant boobs, no background, bad joints and no shadows) why most of these renders have the telltale "poser look".

mmmm...that image is a cropped piece out of a full size render that was 3600x3000. I increased the size of that smaller selection to show the issue.  I also called Colin at e-frontier and he mentioned to me that the minimum shading rate of 0.02 was a good setting.  Raytrace at 2 was ok, 1 might be better, but as he said it is like doing a bracket test on a camera, try a few up and  a few down to find a good happy medium. Minimum Shading is a different thing tho...he suggested a setting of 0.05 not 0.50...much too high. After I get things set up again, since i reloaded poser...thinking the SR3 may have affected the texture filtering. I will let all know what it is about.
Ariana 

the render setting's shading rate is  the minimum shading rate.  so changing it does nothing at all to your picture.  you need to change the individual shading rate on your item as well.  i use a standard minimum of 0.01, with no hits to my render time (as far as i can tell).  if i need the extra detail, i select the item and lower its shading rate (parameters > properties).

ThanX cobaltdream...have you seen this happen before? It only happens on hair as far as I have ever seen.  Is it possible to send a screen shot of the Parameters/Properties location? I have never used that and I am not familiar with where it is. Doesn't it appear to be pixelated? Or at least that is the best word I can come up with to explain it. ThanX!!!
Ariana

yep, i've seen it before.  in eyelashes too, and especially using wild hair up close.  i'll have to wait till i get home to send  a screenshot, but you know the parameters window with all the dials?  there should be a second tab.  click on that one, and you should see the name of what you've selected, whether it's visible or not, and whether it can cast a shadow or not.  it should also have a shading rate, which probably has the default of 0.2.

if the hair is a figure and has several parts, you can set the rate for each one.  so if the bangs are a separate part and it's the only part giving you trouble, you can set that part low and leave the rest.  conversely, if you want to affect the whole hair, you have to set the shading rate for each part.

ThanX a bunch I know where that is! I will look...
ThanX! IM me if possible this evening later!
HuggerZ!
Ariana

Quote - Turn texture filtering off.

Are you sure about this?  Because for several of Kozaburo's hairsets
he recommends that Texture Filtering be turned ON.  And I have found
that they indeed do look better with Texture Filtering set to ON.

that's great if you're using poser 7, and can use it on one material.  texture filtering can actually mess up body textures.  sorry, i didn't forget, the night just kind of got away from me:

No Prob! I have other issues now..have you ever heard of HKey issues with Poser? I had to uninstall and reinstall 3 times because for some reason P6 started doing the texture shredding that P7 does in higher resolution renders! So I uninstalled P7, until the sr1 comes along...and it didn't help. So I unistalled P6 and I still keep getting skin shred! See pic above. It actually shows up on V3 immediately! How weird. So I think before I reinstall today...I took P6 out last nite, I am going to call e-frontier and ask about that too. It seems to be a progressive degradation. I may have to go so far as debug and reformat to clean out the system! Thank the Goddess I have everything on an external and secoundary drive! UGH! :P I'll be back in a few hours with some sort of answer. CobaltDream, if you know if there is a way to clear out the registry (*or anyone else) let me know before i go the drastic route! It's going to be a sucky day...I can see it already! LOL! HuggerZ! Ariana

Texture shredding? Never encountered this before in low or high res renders.
Are you talking about the banded effect on your characters breast in the last pic you posted? I could be way off the mark here, but I'd say that could be the result of a poorly biased or low sized shadowmap or AO (?).

Interested to find out more about texture shredding if P7 does this.

wow, i wish i knew something that could help.  your picture looks great to me, except for that slight banding carodan mentioned.  looks like it has something to do with blinn?  or specularity of some sort?

Quote - *"but it's a bummer when folks say to turn bounces down to 1 IMVHO. not that it matters
in this example (more than 1 bounce would be a waste of resources here), but that is one
of the reasons (in addition to giant boobs, no background, bad joints and no shadows) why
most of these renders have the telltale "poser look"."

*I meant to respond to this before. If the Poser manual is to be believed the number of raytrace bounces only really comes into effect if reflective or refractive (i.e. using the reflect or refract channels in the root shader) surfaces are present in your scene. It refers (I think) to objects self-reflecting between other reflective surfaces (think of two mirrors facing each other).  It wouldn't to my understanding improve the quality of raytraced shadows or any other specular effects. The number of bounces would determine how many times this self reflection occurs.
So unless your scene has such reflective surfaces a raytrace bounce of 1 is all that's required and wouldn't be the cause of renders having a "poser look".
 I may be wrong of course - I'm just going by what I read in the manual and in other threads.

In the example here it's concievable that the metalic buckles could self-reflect more than once and benefit from more bounces, but 1 bounce would still give a nice effect.

**Well I did a removal of the P7 Prefs that were in the My Documents section of the puter, and ScanDisk + Defragged...finally I got P6 to install clean again. I now do not have the weird issues...? Isn't that strange that this happened after i installed P7 and after I cleaned it out entirely it was ok??? I wanted to thank everyone who got involved and especially Teyon who went out of his way to assist me! See pic to see improved textures. HuggerZ! Ariana**

Looking very good. Did you make any changes to settings to improve the quality? - I noticed you changed the lighting.

One thing I have noticed since I upgraded to P7 is that the cached renders appear the same in both P6 and P7 - i.e. whatever app I'm using shows the last renders even if done in the other app. I assume that's supposed to be the case.

wow, that looks great!