Quote - IDL is legitimate global illumination with accurate occlusion effects, things that were faked prior with a lot of tedious adjusting. Highly realistic. SSS emulates how light is absorbed and scattered by various substances, it's possible to create very realistic renders of various materials. Skin, wax, anything that is (semi)translucent. It's not that difficult to get a handle on these things with a some reading and testing, there's also many tutorials and discussions, documentation, scripts and freebies relating to such that makes the implementation of these advances easier. Snarlygribbly's EZSkin (free), Bagginsbill's EnvironmentSphere (free). All of these are pretty much standard operating procedure in Poser now. It's the nature of the beast in this medium to have to digest copious amounts of tech info in order to best serve your vision; Once you have this knowledge at your disposal you'll be able to readily manifest your ideas in a more intuitive way.

I understand about the need to absorb the tech to feed better the intuitive, (which when you consider it is actually a counter-intuitive formula). The problem is the difficulty I have absorbing.....everything of late. All the poop I have been through the last three years (3 family deaths, loss of work in my field and no hope in sight of getting back on track, increasingly weaker back and body as a result of it, encroaching age and all it brings to the table, no health insurance, depression.....and....blah..blah...blah.....

Poser is in place to help sooth me but the drugs I need to take along with all that has transpired of late, make absorption more and more difficult. I used to be able to read    1 to 2 books a week. I have 3 books started and have had them so for the past 6 months and can't seem to complete them due to lack of concentration and remembering who is whom and doing what where, etc.

If it isn't simply simple I flounder. I bought the Perfect V4 series of injections from Meipe and had so much difficulty figuring it all out I begged him/her to help and they sent me a complete .Cr2 to add the injections to to avoid having to go to python scripting and/or all the other prep work needed to get to the injection point.

Nothing is easy for me anymore friend so now maybe you can understand my concern to jump into the next Poser iteration and all I will need to learn to use it. Cloth room, Hair room, using and creating magnets, etc. all black magic  after reading and studying and asking for help, since the beginning of my work in Poser (V.4 to be exact), I still don't get it.   :(