Hi everyone, I am just wondering if someone can briefly explain to me what highlight, ambient, and reflective colors are when it comes to that surface material window in Poser 4. Thanks a lot.

That's a damn good question that I've been asking myself for nearly three years. I can't answer that one but I can give a bit of vaguely relevant information. I like working in cartoon + line mode and I found that in that mode some figures I downloaded from the web had faces that were outlined in dots rather than lines. After about a year of investigation I have found that that is caused by the transparency maps applied to the lashes. This can be fixed by selecting lashes in the material box (obscured by your red line at top right) and then setting all the transparency sliders to zero. I know there aren't many perverts like me that like to work in cartoon + line mode, but maybe this will be of use to somebody. I hope you get an answer to your question as this whole area is one of puzzlement to me.

Object is simple, it's the object's colour. Highlight is the colour applied to the highlight - set the amount of highlight on the slide bar to determine hos much of the object gets highlighted in this colour (true black = no highlight colour), reflection is the colour of the reflects (and can do illogical things) and ambient is strange glow that can make your render awesome, or just be a pain in the arse. Load a simple prop into a new window, set your light map low (256 default is fine) and play around with the colours for a whole afternoon, rendering everytime. There's no better way to get to grips with this stuff.

Ambiant set to black is why poser people often have such ugly black shadows under their chins and arms when rendered. Select the skin (in the menu hidden under your line, top right) and make the ambiant color a nice dark mauve (purplish-grey, I use H-S-V commands, with the value at about 15%). Do a test render of a naked person against a neutral background. Do another with the ambiant set to black. You might even play with bright lime green and run a test. I think you'll want to avoid black ambiance for skin tones if you are doing live people. (Zombies are another matter.) OK, now select the "head" camera and close up on the face. Run a test render with ambiance on black. Find iris and pupils in that menu and set the ambiant color to orange (full strength) and render it again with the main lights down low: with the right settings, you can do hell-hounds and other glowy-eyed monsters. You can play with the reflective color the same way. Only by testing will you really find out what the dials can do... and you will inadvertantly discover some great effects. When you do something which you like, make a note of your settings! You may not need a milky-eyed moon maiden now, but when you do, you will want to remember how you got "that look". Carolly

Was going to pass on this one but found that hauksdottir's comments about ambient lights were vastly different than my experience. So, let me give my lame concepts of the universe a shot: The Object color is added to the color of any light sources hitting a given pixel on the object. (actually, the inverse of the Object color is subtracted from the color of the light sources hitting the pixel, but thinking of it that way will scramble your brain) Ambient color is applied to the pixel even if none of the light sources actually strike that particular pixel. IMHO, using ANY Ambient color tends to produce unnatural, artificial results, i.e. omni-directional lighting with no source & no highlighting or shadow effects. This does not occur in the real world but can be used to mask problems resulting from otherwise ineffective lighting control. If there are "ugly black shadows" under the chin and arms, that is just because none of your light sources are hitting your figure in those areas. (A cheap shot perhaps but I strongly disagree with the above post) I do agree however, that ambienet light color can be used, on purpose, to create some very spooky and unnatural special effects, such as the glowing eyes she mentioned. Highlight color is pretty cool if used correctly. In the real world it would be a combination of the object color and the color of the light hitting the pixel, but Poser lets you make it anything you like. Setting the size is the cool part. This determines how "shiny" the object will appear. A small highlight size (and I'm going to take liberty with some terms here) will produce a small "focused" light "reflection" as might appear on a very shiny material. A larger highlight size will produce a broader, "unfocused" or diffused highlight as would appear on a material with a more irregular or coarse surface. If you are in a dim room right now, point to the bottom of your monitor so that your fingernail is backlit. To do that in Poser you would put a high luminance color and small highlight size on the nail material, but if you point again, you will see that the back of your hand is also highlighted, but less shiny. This would get a high luminance highlight color but this time with a larger highlight size on the slider. Perhaps a simpler example in Poser would be to take a square prop with a wave applied to it. With a small highlight size it would look shiny like plastic. As you increased the highlight size and diffused it, the material would appear less shiny and go from plastic to satin to silk to cotton. The Reflection color is just added to the color applied to the pixel from any reflection map used. There are check boxes to add the color of the light source and/or the Object color to the calculation of this color. If there is no reflection map applied, then this does nothing... I think. (Now that I think about it, I'm not sure what happens if you turn up the reflection sliders & just have a reflection color but don't use a R-map. Gonna have to go play with that one.)

Nance, If Poser was a real rendering program, then the black in the shadows would indeed be caused by poor setup of lights and camera. HOWEVER, Poser doesn't handle bounced lighting, radiosity, or natural lighting at all, and does a poor job of spotlighting. (And I realize that there are experts here who have written fine tutorials on proper lighting setup for Poser.) The real world is full of light. If I wanted to get into it, I could mention that the colors of the shadows are affected by the color of the light source, the atmosphere, and any nearby surfaces... as well as their natural surface properties. IE: we have a yellow sun, and so shadows on snow tend to be bluish purple, so what would they be if the sun was red? Until Poser 5 (which I sincerely hope has a better renderer), we'll have to muddle along, or bring our Poser people into Bryce and Lightwave. Faking bounced light by using the ambiant channel to add light to the object is a fake... but it does work. Carolly

heyas; i think the easy answers are: the object colour is the base colour. the ambient colour is the shadow colour. (ie: whatever colour you want to appear when there is no light on the object.) the reflective colour is, i believe, the base colour for the refletion map. (it works like the object colour under a skin map, as you probably have noticed if you ever had your reflection colour set to black and a reflection map turned on.) the highlight colour, now, is tricky. there's two parts to it. the first and most obvious is the colour, it will impart a colour to the higlights of your object. the not-so-obvious is the brightness. the brighter the colour, the stronger and more plasticky the highlight is. this is why most people say to set the highlight colour to black. this causes the highlights not to appear as black spots, but to be subdued, so the skin doesn't have that bright glare on it. you may think that the highlight colour should be a lighter shade of the base colour, but this isn't quite the case. to avoid the plasticky look, you should pick a dark colour. you can use the greyscale stuff for neutral highlights, or pick a dark colour to have coloured highlights. there, thouroughly confused now? :)