Yay - love the interest. More renders!

I think the white preview happens also with face_off's shaders. I believe it is because there really are two shader models, the old P4 model (the simple material room) and the full blown P5 model (the advanced material room).

I do not fill in any of the information for the P4 version. I know that "touching" the mat zone will update the P4 version with dumbed-down info from the P5 shader tree. This basically involves a very stupid simple thing - Poser looks for the first color image attached to the Diffuse_Color input. It plugs that into the P4 preview jigger. Now for me this happens as soon as I load the shader (in P6), but occasionally it doesn't, so I know what you guys are talking about.

There is no doubt that the preview does not analyze or use any complex shader tree information, so it doesn't know things that are obviously known inside the mat room preview.

When you select one of the black presets, you're not loading a new color image. I actually have the white and black skins loaded all the time. They both go into a Blender node. That Blender node let's you blend anywhere between fully white and fully black. This is controlled by the PM:Skin 2 Blend dial. You can choose 0 (100% caucasian), 1 (100% african), .5 (half and half), .75 (3/4 black) etc.

The preview doesn't know anything about this. It just knows that the first color image file (the caucasian) is what it's going to show you in the pose room preview.

The renders above show the default preset, but with various settings of PM:Skin 2 Blend changing.

I believe the P7 hardware-accelerated pose preview actually does try to implement the shader full shader tree in OpenGL. I'm told that my shader slows P7 down something fierce when you try to use that feature.

I haven't seen anybody besides me render the teeth. I'm particularly proud of the teeth - it's always been difficult to get them to look good. See, to get good renders, you must use IBL. But IBL tends to make the inner mouth parts glow too much. You can try AO, but that just doesn't do a good job on such complicated geometry. Poser AO is only a rough approximation and works ok for a hand or shirt close to the skin, but doesn't figure out all the nooks and crannies in the mouth. I tried many different settings for light-based AO and shader node AO - nothing worked well. So I did a trick. I hardly use any diffuse on the teeth and tongue. IBL doesn't generate any data for specular nodes - only diffuse light is generated. So the teeth and tongue are almost completely lit by specular nodes. This makes them ignore the IBL. Yet they look like diffuse, and hopefully with some subsurface scattering in there too. I thought this was a pretty clever solution.

Let's see your teeth renders. Use my lights - the face light - with really clean shadows.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)