OP asks:

Quote - Upon examining their materials in the Materials room, I have observed that they have elements such as "Blinn" ... Can anyone shed light on how these shaders work or how they are applied, or perhaps direct me to a good tutorial?

The vast majority of the shader you see are copies of a shader I posted at runtime dna.

I did a lot of experiments and published what came to be called the S+B shader (scatter + blinn).

Then, snarlygribbly made a Poser python script called EZSkin, where he made it possible to apply my S+B shader (and some newer variations) to just about any figure and texture set with a single mouse click.

So the easiest way to make these effects is to use EZSkin.

Original article that demonstrated S+B:

http://www.runtimedna.com/forum/showthread.php?64789-Which-node-SubsurfaceSkin-or-Scatter-Blinn

A later addition was the Fresnel_Blend node and using blurred reflections (Reflect node). This was called S+B+FBR (Fresnel blended reflections). With this arrangement, it is possible to render realistic skin with no Poser lights at all.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/full.php?image_id=2257747

http://www.runtimedna.com/forum/showthread.php?63200-SSS-on-Human-Figures&p=630590&viewfull=1

If you want to see the whole history of this start at the beginning of that thread

http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?63200-SSS-on-Human-Figures

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