lol I meant I am doing a render at this moment with the light meter

Quote -  here it is with Ao,(on the ibl) she looks different, you see.
I am rendering with the light meter now, if that's still useful

It would be useful if we could see it.

And your earlier images also had AO.

You know there are two kinds of AO - light-based and material based.

You just said "here it is with AO". That's incorrect. Here it is with MORE AO.

You had it on somewhere before as well. Now you have more of it.

 ah ok more Ao lol sorry I am only learning as you can see from my join date.

Here is the render, this isn't good is it? too much red to the extreme.

Right - just for grins, turn off the IBL. How much light is there then. How does your skin look then?

Notice how the outer ring, which measures specular, is almost black. In Poser, IBL is not used for specular (too bad). By having the 100% IBL and relatively weak main lights, your specular effect is completely unbalanced. The two parts should be roughly equally reacting to light.

ok i will turn off ibl give me a few mins
Thanks for being patient, it must be frustrating people not knowing what to do. I plan to read your pots and other threads tomorrow. I never read them before  

Quote -  Ok I can't sleep lol Ok here's my data! If only I could take screen captures.
My blinn node is plugged into the alternative_specular node, and haseccentricity at 1.00 and sec roll off at 0.0006 and the reflectivity at 0.0007. I have no Gc at all and the lighting rig is simple-1 ibl light at 100% intensity, 1 grey main light at 50% intensity and one spot light at 57% intensity.

Don't use gray lights. Use white and adjust the intensity with the intensity dial.

The effective luminance of lighting is the product (multiplication) of the color and the intensity. Gray is a number less than 1. Talking about lights with an unspecified gray is pretty much the same as telling me nothing about your light. Plus, if you ever start using render GC, such light sets will be completely different, because the gray will be anti-gamma corrected, resulting in a different luminance. Get used to white lights, unless you're trying to make a colored light, like blue or red.

Your Blinn parameters are out of whack. But you wouldn't know it, because you have so little specular light and so much diffuse light. (Note: This is a Poser concept and has nothing to do with physics. There is only one kind of light in real life. The material decides to treat it as specular or diffuse.)

As a starting point, your Blinn values should be .4, .4, .4.  It's easy to remember that way. It's not perfect, but way better to start with than what you have.

Once you get things balanced, then we tweak.

Great. Now we're getting somewhere.

Set your non-IBL lights to white. You said you have one gray main light and one spot light. By main, did you mean infinite? The light types are infinite, point, spot, and IBL. There is no "main".

Drop the spot light for now. Set your main (infinite) to 75%, white.

Set your white IBL to 15%. Set the IBL Contrast (in the material room for the light) to 1.

Your figure will still be dark, but that's a valid light setup. We will then GC your figure and all will be well.

When I'm adjusting lighting, I don't do big renders or high render settings. You can get faster turnaround by doing a half-size render. On the render panel, there is a pulldown that usually says "Full". Change that to half for test renders.

 ok thanks bb, give me a mo

Right. So the figure looks really dark because you tuned it to work in a blast furnace.

What is the Diffuse_Value? Probably a pretty low number. Usually it should be .8.

Or is the shader more complicated, such that a simple number is not meaningful?

This is what the meter looks like with a 75% white infinite and a 15% white IBL.

The figure is stock base V4. No fancy shaders.

 the diffuse value is 1.0

 I did exactly what you did lol Why is mine so dark? How do i do screen capture?

OK go fix your lights.

75% white
15% white IBL contrast = 1

 I did that, but when I put the white ibl to 15% it turns black

 i know whats wrong give me a sec

ok I don't know lol

What is it I'm doing wrong I wonder?

I don't know. Look at your light colors. On the Parameters tab, the Red, Green, and Blue should be 1.000.

I have to get to bed - have a meeting early in the morning. I'll catch up with you tomorrow.

 yes i need to sleep too. I will try to post a screenshot of my settings tomorrow.

Thanks for the help

Your bump appears too high.  You should decrease it.  Also, did you set up your lighting as BB recommended?

 yes, did you not see the previous posts? lol 
All I get is darkness

Can you give us a screencap of your skin shader arrangement, extreme left side of the VSSProp, the number and type of lights you are using and their intensities. 

I don't think it's VSS. There is no specular.

 you are right, there is no specular. I actually quite like the shader as is, even though there is no specular. I think I will keep this shader as seperate one, but advance with your ideas BB.
Sorry I have been busy all day, didn't have time to do any more work on the shader. So i will show you more tomorrow, ok?

 BB, I sent you a sitemail

 Sorry to reiterate and it's not really important since I'm using P8 now.. but I never heard about anything that broke hair in Poser 7, so I'm curious.. what exactly was broken with SR3?

I like the detail in the face, but the face is a bit pink, and the scalp is a bit gray.

 wow she looks great BB, but the lighting is a bit dull still, i think, could you show me something in a daylight scene.

Thanks, how did you get this result? I couldn't for the life of me lol

I don't mind the scalp being green, because I will be applying hair to her.

BB's light setting for these renders pretty much simulate daylight conditions.  The only difference is the lack of color tinting to the lights themselves.  However, not all scene daylight conditions are the same and is dependent on your background images.  In those instances, using P8 or PP 2010, you would elect using IDL within a skydome and forego using IBL.

It's improving.  I noticed some artifacting on the upper left edge of her lip.  Actually, I see it at both ends.  What lights are your running now with this render?

New little experiment, added more imperfection, think I got abit carried away but I will tone it down, but I like the effect. This is my own light.

That looks very good.

Agreed.

thanks for the tips and about the specular! Doing specular maps really improves the skin.

BB, freak 4 is a morph of M4, were you installing it in the same folder as M4? Just a thought.

I am an idiot. Of course.

Yah, so VSS works great with the Sarsa textures that come with the Freak, as far as I can tell.

**MysticDaniel, are you going to offer your shader for sale or download?
**