Hia Cho.. and welcome!

I just wanted to elaborate a bit on SSAfam1's recommendation to get bagginsbill's free VSS (Versatile Shader System), which I completely agree with. Like... what is it, what does it do, why should anyone need it?

Firstly, about Poser's 'Shaders'. Poser tries to replicate in its virtual 3D space what happens in the real world regarding the interaction of light with surfaces. It does this using 'shaders', which are the things you can see in the advanced Material Room associated with each 'material zone' on a 3D object in your scene. The simplest Shaders just consist of a single Poser Material (the 'root node') with various colours and values dialled in... for things like Diffuse light, Specular light, Ambient light, Transparency, etc. etc. Complicated shaders, which attempt to realistically emulate the properties of things like human skin, can contain a baffling maze of dozens of boxes plugged into that root node.

The other thing to note... and it is very apparent in most newbie Poser pictures (mine included)... is that Poser versions before Poser Pro do not automatically adjust rendered images for how they are displayed on computer screens, which is not linear. In simple terms, the perceived brightness is not proportional to the actual light intensity. In slightly more technical terms, Poser (before Poser Pro came along) does not Gamma Correct for you. That is why, in your picture, the shadowed areas of the image, especially her skin, are too dark in comparison with the rest. This is a typical Poser non-Gamma Corrected render, and can be fixed with a little knowledge and a few good tools.

bagginsbill's VSS product, whilst designed for general material texturing applications, actually comes with extremely good skin shader templates for Victoria4 already built into it. These skin shader templates are designed to replace the skin shader setup that come with your V4 character, but still use your character's own texture files (image maps). The VSS V4 shader templates also include gamma correction, for use in Poser 6 and 7 (I'm not sure about 5). With the 'as-supplied' VSS prop loaded into your scene, a single button click (Synchronise) will adjust all your character's shaders, with (usually) startlingly good results. There are many comparison images out there, but I'll give you a link to my own as an example.

Izi's VSS V4 Skin Shader Comparison (no nudity but slightly cheeky)

I'll have to leave your other questions to others for the moment, 'cos I'm at work!

Oh, apart from one thing... the 3D human models we use are not as bendy and squishy as we are. That's why you get things like those hard lines along the pelvis/thigh and thigh/calf joints with large joint movements. Often the only way to eliminate such shortcomings of the 3D model from your final work is to do some postwork on the render using an image editing program. There are some purists who do anything to avoid postwork, but that's just their preferred workflow... don't let anyone persuade you there is anything wrong with it!

Hope this helps a little.
Izi

"If I were a shadow, I know I wouldn't like to be half of what I should be."
Mr Otsuka, the old black tomcat in Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)