I just rendered one of my characters and the neck is totally blacked out. This has never happened before and I can't figure it out. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? Help would be much appreciated! Thank you.

Could be just a lighting problem, or could be that the facets on the
neck are facing inward.  If you're sure it's not lighting, try these:

First: in the material room, find the material that includes the neck,
and check the "Normals Forward" box toward the bottom of the material.
Second, if that doesn't work: Select the neck.  Click on the grouping tool.
In the grouping panel, push the "Reverse Group Normals" button.

If either of these works, re-save the character afterward.

I should have explained more. It is not just the neck that gets blacked out when I render my character but also the back of her hair, her ears, the collar of the shirt and a little bit of her shoulders.

One other little problem is the fringe of hair across her forehead that was not there when I was styling her hair. I guess I could take care of this in Photoshop, although I'd rather not have it in the render if possible. Again I can't figure out why it rendered that way and would like to know if anyone has any ideas or tips.

I'm going to try to attach a picture of the character before rendering and after rendering to try and show the problems visually.

These problems are driving me crazy, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. 

Do you get the same effect if you make the hair invisible (just a bald head)?  Jan

It looks like the hair is shadowing . Try turning shadows off for the hair and see what happens then.  Thats object properties for the hair .
Are you using ray traced or mapped shadows . ?

 I turned shadows off for all parts of the hair and the render was still blacked out in the same spots. I believe I am using ray traced, it's the same settings I've used with my other renders with no problems.

Plutom, when I made the hair invisible, the render was fine, no blacked areas. I've used this hair before without any problems. Any ideas why this is happening?

Thank you for any help you can give me. 

Hi Isyl, maybe--check how many parts you have to the hair (Materials Room-especially the transparency settings).  Click on the part of the hair that is okay-record the settings and nodes, go to the bad part and see if there are differences (a node not connected, transparency setting not the same etc.

 If everything looks okay, then to eliminate the hair as the source of your problem, put on another hair piece-if everything clears up, its definitely a portion of the hair object that may have become corrupted.  If you have multiple parts to the hair, make portions invisible, if the problem goes away, its in the part that you made invisible, narrow it down and you will find the culprit.

I had a problem with a hair piece (bang portion).  Whenever I tried to render the scene, Poser would simply close leaving me with my default windows' screen.  As soon as I made the bangs invisible, my problem went away and everything rendered fine.  Jan

That looks like it's the hair, not the neck.  Check "Normals Forward" on every part of the hair.

SamTherapy, I did what you said and the image above is how it rendered. It is no longer blacked out but the ears, some of the neck, and the shirt collar are still gone.

I have no idea what to do. If something did become corrupt, can it be fixed? I didn't have these problems when I used the hair before.

Thank you for all the help you are trying to give me, I appreciate it. I just wish I could figure out the problem and fix it.

How about a polygonal preview image of the hair?  It looks like the inner portion of the hair should have transparency applied, where it apparently overlaps and covers parts of the neck.  Is that hairpiece designed for use with that figure, or adapted from another?  I would either hide those inner portions of the hair using transparency or pull them back using a magnet.

It's difficult to tell what's going on there but at least you got rid of the black bits.

Try the non-obvious things now...

Check your menus and see exactly what you have loaded.  It may be you have another copy of the hair loaded, which is partially obscuring things.  If not that, check to see the hair itself is positioned correctly.  You could have twisted some part of it in a weird way. 

Check the material settings for the hair,  and the figure.  Make sure you haven't accidentally loaded part of the hair texture and transmap onto the figure.  It doesn't look likely but check anyhow.

Something else...  Is the figure facing forward?  That is, hip rotation 0 along the Y axis?  Sometimes turning 180 degrees in Y makes clothes and hair twist in weird ways.  A degree either way usually solves it.

If all else fails, delete the hair from the scene and reload it onto your figure.

One thing I neglected to ask... are the hair and whatever clothes you have there actually made for this model, or have you scaled them to fit?  Sometimes scaling makes things go daft.