Quote - Bagginsbill, do you have any insights into why Poser pro will render a bump map in more detail the closer the camera is to it, and less detail the farther away it is?
In other words, I have a bumpy surface, which looks great close up, but not even a hint of bump a little farther back away from the camera. And I don't mean so far away that it's just not noticeable due to distance. I mean, it's showing no bump whatsoever, and it SHOULD be at least a little visibly bumpy.

Usually that's texture filtering at work. The idea behind texture filtering is that when a single pixel of the render covers many pixels of the texture, a problem occurs. If you just sample one data point from the texture, you essentially get a random subset of the values, and this can create severe aliasing or moire patterns. If you know something about sampling theory, this phenomenon should be familiar.

To combat this we can do one of two things. We can over-sample the material and average the sampled values. Or we can low-pass filter the texture first. (Texture filtering) Over-sampling is more accurate but slower. Effectively, you "render big" and then reduce the result. The texture filtering is much faster, but it really needs tuning to take and Poser provides no tools to do that. You either turn on texture filtering, or you don't.  The big problem with texture filtering is that it effectively blurs your texture. If conditions are right, the blur can lead to a complete loss of any detail - only the low frequency elements are retained and if you have none, then you end up with nothing.

Try disabling texture filtering on that bump map. You may then experience moire and aliasing, but usually not with something like a human skin bump map. It happens with things like cloth weaves and such - something with a repeating pattern. If you do have aliasing problems, you can decrease the shading rate and increase pixel samples, or you can render at 2x size and then reduce in postwork. Recent experiments indicate that rendering 2x desired size can actually do a better job of anti-aliasing than asking for more detailed render over-sampling.

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