I use Victoria with the medium high-res maps, and keep getting artifacts that I don't notice on the other Poser import images I've seen on this forum: 1. The banding around her neck; 2. The 'hot spots' above her lip and to the right of her nose; 3. The geometric 'clunkiness' on the outline of her chin. As far as #3 goes, I've tried different settings in the 'E' dialog (i.e., going from 180 to 360) and haven't noticed a difference. Has anyone else experienced these issues? Thanks

Insofar as the hot spots, did you turn down the specularity on her skin texture? The banding on her neck just may be a problem with the texture itself, not the way Bryce is handling it. Bryce uses a different system of rendering than Poser, and it's possible that all Bryce is doing is highlighting an existing problem in the texture wrap.

This is true: Bryce can show up the warts in a character that Poser doesn't! And one must be careful that the material setting for all the body parts are the same, especially diffusion, ambience, and specularity. Small reminder: best results if diffusion% + ambience% = 100%. Things really do look better if one sticks to this. Also: don't forget to smooth the mesh! Do an "E" on the mesh and smooth it to 180 degrees for all her parts. Well worth it. Takes out some of the corners. Otherwise, you are getting there!

Thanks for both of your inputs! (I'd never heard of that rule for diffusion%+ambience% before, and will try that one out immediately.) And I'll tone down the specularity to see if that helps.

BTW, someone wiser than i did a tiny little tutorial somewhere about how the various specularity settings work. i'm fairly sure i got to it though brycetech.com... dang, my memory is failing me today. i think this is how it goes: The % specularity in the middle of the Mat editor says how much you want, and the specularity color up top spreads it around, from matte effect at black to a sharply shiny point at white. The halo color can give you an iridescence effect. Most cool: if white is very shiny and black is matte, you could use a greyscale texture (procedural or picture) to govern the shininess on a surface. Thus, shiny nose & chin & forehead, matte cheeks. i've been wanting to try that out, myself.

I believe the banding on the neck to be possibly a part of her dress, some clothing items have these extra parts. Try a ctrl-click on that area to see if it's part of the Vicki mesh or not. If not delete it, if it was, undo! :)