I was experimenting with my texture maps and cranked displacement really high. In most other programs the lizard's scales would have become spikes, but in Daz Studio it just looked like a strong bump map. This is odd behavior for “displacement.”

What settings do you have on the displacement? What are your render settings - displacement requires 3Delight instead of OpenGL to work at all.     

I had closed the file without saving and consequently the settings were lost, but I’ll try again later. It’s too bad that there’s no Rosetta Stone for converting the displacement settings of Poser to Daz Studio.

As I understand it Poser and Daz handle displacement maps totally differently. Poser looks at bumps and displacement as a flat surface that does not indent. So dead black is the base and lighter shades of gray to white move up. In daz middle gray is the flat plane. Anything darker is seen as indented while anything lighter gray is seen as pushing up. In addition poser file settings generally come into daz set way to low. You should raise them to 100% and see how that looks. You may also have to play with the + and - some to get the proper depths.  In the long run daz has a more flexible system than poser but most files are created for poser not daz.

Poser looks at bumps and displacement as a flat surface that does not indent. So dead black is the base and lighter shades of gray to white move up. That would explain why I needed to darken my displacement map in PhotoShop until the background was nearly black to keep the gray midrange from blowing up my figure like a balloon in Poser. I'll try the original displacement map in Daz Studio once I've finished tweaking the uvs. Thanks.

Also, don't forget to adapt not only the displacement strength but also the displacement height to your need. The default height of 1 mm will barely show at mid-range.

If you try to load a pz2 or cr2 file with your displaced item it won't work - D|S won't read the advanced settings from Poser material settings, just basic diffuse/bump/reflection/transparency.