Quote - just wanna mention that some poser users may not be able to do advanced IDL renders
with ray-traced trans, reflections, IDL occlusion shadows (not AO) et al., hence there is
a certain logic to baking these things in, even as kozaburo-san useta bake in the hair
hilites back in the old days.

Nah people texture that way simple because it's vastly easier and requires no particularly technique.  I'm a terrible texturer but even I can project a photo onto a mesh and get into a typical Poser texture's ballpark.  Projection texturing a photo reference onto a character mesh is a tiny percentage of the work compared to painting one by hand from scratch.  The "I don't know how" or "you need IDL and high tech stuff" logic does not wash for things like skin speculars, practically all newer Poser skin sets advertise that they include a specular map (and pretty much all of those are filled with nonsense too).

Hair is a bit of a special case, because there isn't really any practical way to get a sheet of 2d polygons to respond like tens of thousands of tiny highly reflective strands of hair. 

Stuff like having a character in a dark room with a vibrant reflection of a forest (and I've seen silly stuff like that), now, that's just dumb.  The stuff that bothers me in the Realism gallery tends to be not much of the "you didn't render this in Maxwell" variety.

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