Attached are the Torso Poser 7 Material Room settings.

This retail item renders like a Shiny Plastic Ken Doll.

What surfaces and values would be the best choices for making it look more like skin and far far less shine?

Many thanks

Make Specular Color Black ...
Change Highlight Size from 100.00 to 0.000

Regarding the skin, it's hardly surprising it has so much plastic shine. The Specular value is set to 1 with a fairly bright Specular colour. I would change the Specular colour to quite a dark grey. Or dark gray if you are in the US.

:O)
Izi

Quote - Regarding the skin, it's hardly surprising it has so much plastic shine. The Specular value is set to 1 with a fairly bright Specular colour. I would change the Specular colour to quite a dark grey. Or dark gray if you are in the US.

:O)
Izi

Many thanks to you and the good Dr Geep.

Hard to believe, this is a retail product from a reputable location.

Well, to be fair it does also depend on how you are lighting the scene. True, this is a very crude skin shader, using just the PoserSurface built-in diffuse and specular settings; but with appropriate lighting it  might look somewhat better.

I would guess that your main (front) light has a strong specular content, adding to the built-in specularity and giving the really plastic look. It might be worth turning off the specular content of your main light (leaving the skin shader as supplied) and see what results you get then, if only as an experiment.

By the way, reducing the Highlight value actually sharpens any reflection you may be getting, making the surface appear smoother. Materials like glass and chrome have very smooth surfaces (low Highlight values) and so produce sharp reflections. Skin/paper etc. have many surface imperfections (higher Highlight values) and so produce more diffuse (spread out) reflections. The Highlight value is not how much reflection you get, but how spread out it is due to small imperfections on the surface.

Izi

Quote - ...Hard to believe, this is a retail product from a reputable location.

I bought V4 Elite.  A really nice set of textures and shaders.  However, the AO is turned up to 25+or so around her eyes and mouth by default even when choosing a non-AO version of the texture.  You have to turn it down manually or she looks like she was on a two week crack binge.

Any excellent product but, with a setting that got overlooked.  It's not surprising, IMO.  But, the problem is that a good many people don't know how to fix such things.  So, what some producers may overlook because even if there was a problem, it'd be trivial for them to fix, turns into a much larger concern for many end-users who don't know how to fix it.

mar, maybe they were selling that shader to get a wet or sweaty look.

No, it was supposed to be a sinister character.
None of the promo images even look like that Ken Plastic Doll Skin.

Let's just say that is touted to look similar to this Rendo Forum Pic, without the opaque eye covering.

Quote - Well, to be fair it does also depend on how you are lighting the scene. True, this is a very crude skin shader, using just the PoserSurface built-in diffuse and specular settings; but with appropriate lighting it  might look somewhat better.

I would guess that your main (front) light has a strong specular content, adding to the built-in specularity and giving the really plastic look. It might be worth turning off the specular content of your main light (leaving the skin shader as supplied) and see what results you get then, if only as an experiment.

By the way, reducing the Highlight value actually sharpens any reflection you may be getting, making the surface appear smoother. Materials like glass and chrome have very smooth surfaces (low Highlight values) and so produce sharp reflections. Skin/paper etc. have many surface imperfections (higher Highlight values) and so produce more diffuse (spread out) reflections. The Highlight value is not how much reflection you get, but how spread out it is due to small imperfections on the surface.

Izi

Once again, thank you very much for the information.
Apparently this item appears to work fine in Default D|S, which I suspect it was created in.
It appears that it wasn't really checked out in Poser.

for the eyesurface you need to set ambient color to black - otherwise you get white glowing eyes.