As far as 'W' being the color of the length of the hair... none of my experiments with hair have involved UV mapping (the hairs I've imported had none), but the hair has still taken the hair shader normally. That, and BB's rainbow hair shader, are a convincing argument.

To hopefully not further confuse the issue, I just tried using a tile pattern on natively grown hair, vs hair I made in Lightwave (drew some lines, grabbed an .hr2, removed already present lines, added mine - no normals, no UVs, just lines and their vertices - opened the .hr2 in Poser, fiddled with the 'verts per hair' dial to let Poser re-draw the lines, so it can correctly interpolate the population and not crash... it's a convoluted method, but I found that if you just import the hair as an .obj, it will preview, but won't render at all - apparently it loses it's 'W' element?)... and got this. What the heck is this? :tongue2: I'm sure that's saying something about how the hair rendering works, but I don't know what. :blink:

 But as I said, it uses hair shaders just fine, as you can see in the lower image.  Beats me... ;p
 

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currently using Poser Pro 2014, Win 10