Quote - the results look virtually the same in the firefly render window as they do in the preview window and thats without too many setting changes why is that?

It just happens to be that the shader settings used in Danae's texture/shader combination represents pretty accurately in the OpenGL preview.  It can be frustrating, especially when you get into some other materials that don't represent at all (e.g. use of the Color_Math node to adjust color), but there is little you can do about it other than do test renders.

You are better off than you might think though; as much as people might pick on Poser for this aspect or that, and say program X or Y is much better, honestly the presentation of the Materials Room advanced view is very elegant and much easier to get your head around than it is in the bigger applications like 3ds Max or Cinema 4D.  Your best bet is to force yourself to start learning it, at least to the point where you can modify some very nice skin material setup that you like, or to customize some aspects that you want to change.  For example as much as I like Danae's Milan textures I would never use the included sclera as they are, they're way too blue in color.

The Poser manual is actually pretty solid in getting you started, although it takes some time to really get a grip on the more complex shader setups, and you may never really fully understand what is going on with some of them - I don't pretend to either.  However even if you don't understand every single feature, you can appreciate the result, and you can learn to pick out the things that need to be modified (mainly texture map, bump map, and sometimes transparency map or specular map).

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