I'm a newbie to Poser to Bryce stuff, so how does one get rid of the pastiness of anything with an image texture on it? I know how to put on a bump map and the trans map...but things still don't look right. The skin in particular lacks the the depth of real skin. This is my practice with the only post being the work on the hair and the initials.

First thing ya want to do is make sure the ambience is turned right down. For some reason, Poser textures import to bryce with it turned up. Then try a bit of specularity with the spec color a deep brown. I find this helps. Hope it helps you too :) Styxx

Also, turn off the Gamma correction in Bryce. (It's the render option - fourth triangle down.)

Yes, the import does max out the diffusion and ambience. I find that by equalizing the two to sum up to 100 makes for a nice starting point. Like diffusion 80.4 and ambience 19.6 with a touch of spec. Textures on poser figures can always use a bit of extra lighting to bring them out. I use a few ranged falloff radials around the figure to bring out the highlights. Depending on the atmosphere lighting adjust the controls for these to suit your taste. Also as Crescent mentioned...lose the gamma setting...it's hell on poser figures. I believe that the gamma is only useful on substandard monitors.

Also note that the figures import with ambience set to black. Change it to the texture. It would be nice to have some little program to tweak the .mtl file automatically before loading into Bryce. I've thought about this, but I haven't worked out the file syntax yet.

Thanks for the help all! I played with it very briefly last night and it made a big difference.

Lunaseas--WOW what a difference! i hadn't gotten the bit about the Gamma correction yet. Looks like you've sent the chalky effect packing. Phantast--about that MTL file. i always have to spend a while telling Bryce where the textures are upon first importing. How annoying! Put a way to know the relative paths into the wish list, please, if you ever do decipher that file. i'm sure more than myself would thank you profusely.

Nfredman, Before you import your obj, make a sphere and go into the picture thingy in the material editor and load all your textures in. That way when you bring in the obj Bryce already knows where the textures are and doesn't bug you about it. Lyrra