> Quote - ..... Are you saying the location / distance of the polygons relative to the origin matters?  So far as the location of the prop, I've seen this occur no matter where in the scene the prop was placed.  But yes I think it would be easy to edit the origin point though I don't wish to since I think that would make placement awkward.

I meant absolute size/distance of the origin. In the illustration i modeled a simple wall in blender. It is approximately 6 blender units long, i.e. 3 units to the left, 3 to the right. I put 2 pillars at the x-positions of -2 and -1 (marked in first image).

I imported the wall into Poser; i disable all options on import like "scale to figure size", "modify normals" and such when importing the model as a wavefront-obj. The object is quite large, so i moved the camera away for this example. I assigned a simple granite material with default settings to the wall (second image).

Rendering that shows that the granite wall gets ugly exactly at the position of the "-2"-pillar (third image).

When i change the granite's scale to 0.5 the wall's material gets corrupt at the rightmost pillar instead (fourth image).

Because the material is centered at the wall's origin, moving it around will not help. But you can check the "Global coordinates" checkbox of the granite node and then move the wall around. Then the bad granite will stay where it is.

In this example i used the ambient channel and no lights, so even without multiplying with light or something it looks wrong enough.

Quote - ...

I've noticed that the material as it appears in the Material Room versus its appearance on the wall is quite different.  In the Material Room the distortions that are supposed to simulate marble veins (and it does it pretty poorly in my opinion) are much larger in the Material Room than on the wall itself when rendered.  I'm not entirely sure why this is or how to go about fixing it.  For some reason the Marble MAT seems to be "tiled" very small on the wall.   As a result those pink "spots" are probably so small the Firefly engine can't render them properly and runs into the same issue that causes the strange shadow effect with very small props (this flaw in Firefly seems to be becoming the bane of my Poser existence, so to speak).

The marble is different from the granite. The granite has only veins in z-direction, whereas the marble node produces something more like dark and light layers in x direction. Combining those (like in the poser marble material) would result in 3 different appearences of the sides of your wall (if you could see the top side). This seems wrong to me somehow, but i am no geologist, so i do not really know how real marble is made. Anyway you can fiddle with the scale of the marble node to vary the size, reasonable values are from one up to 100.

Quote - That's my best guess at the moment.

The solution would be to scale the whole MAT effect up, but I don't know how to do this.  There doesn't seem to be any node I can add that would just control the scaling (rather a silly thing for them to overlook when making the material nodes).  Likewise, the default Brick MAT that came with Poser 6 renders correctly but the bricks are HUGE on the same wall area, fortunately that one I can scale down.

So it appears the root of my problem is a scaling issue and I'm not sure how to go about fixing this.   How do I tell Poser to scale applied MATs in some uniform way?  Texture maps work just fine and have no problems, but some material files seem to have scaling issues, others do not.

In the marble material it should work to increase the scale setting all nodes (marble nodes and granite node) by the same factor (apart from the bug with the granite node, that is).

Quote - I'm all ears for suggestions on this one.  For the time being I'm limited to Poser 6, and for sake of backwards compatability I want to solve it for that version forward.  But dear god I hope Poser 10 / Pro 2014 handles this better! LOL

I do not have that version, but i think Poser has a strong focus on backwards compatibility, so so they might not change that particular annoyance, even if it is a bug; some models might depend on it.

Quote - Otherwise the only thing I know to do at this point is continue with the project, stick with the intended texture maps (which will look far and away better than these MATs, I'm not actually planning to use MATs and ran into this purely by accident) and include a note in the documentation that some MAT files may not work properly with the props.

If this is for distribution i would probably use image maps, too, especially when these kinds of problems pop up. One big advantage of the procedural materials is (in my opinion) is, that you do not need to uv-unwrap the models, but since you seem to have done that already, so ....

Quote - Course that annoys me, they SHOULD work and the fact they don't bugs me.  I have no such problems in Blender where the equivalent of MATs render beautifully.  So.... Firefly sucks... there, I said it... I'm glad I said it.  LOL  (Appologies to Joss Wheadon, not THAT Firefly.)

Again, thanks for the input and suggestions, not sure I'd have gotten this far without it and if nothing else I'm learning things about how Poser works that I didn't know.