One essential thing about skin textures is lighting. Bagginsbill has often pointed out that Poser scenes tend to be 'overlighted' by far. Since I have pushed myself deeper into improving my figures skins, the only environment I can accept is the following:

1. I always (say again: ALWAYS) use IDL nowadays, long gone are the days where you struggled with AO (trying to fake IDL). And because I build real scenes around the character even for a portrait, which reflects the light in a correct way and gives true reflections where needed, I have completely abandoned IBL as well.

2. I have reduced light powers far below what I had been used to do in former times. I apply an environmental sphere for outdoors, where the image is not plugged to the diffuse at all, but instead to the ambience color of the sphere, ambience value set to 1 or below. Usually in outdoor scenes I have but one single infinite light, adjusted to around 40 to 45 percent, to serve as sun. If your lights are too strong, skin becomes very ugly, SSS does not work properly, and color tints may occur. My standard startup scene in Poser contains Bagginsbills (free) Light Meter and his (free) Gamma Meter, so I can always make sure I don't overlight the scenes. For indoor scenes, if there is a window I also use the environmental sphere outside to cast the diffuse light, which is needed, through the window. I may add an infinite light as sun, if I want the sun to enter the room. If there is only indoor lighting (lamps), I position an appropriate spot or point light exactly where the light props are in the scene. Again turning them WAY DOWN, and again using IDL gives the necessary realistic corner shadows also on skin. Usually I adjust IDL quality to not less than 7 bounces for the final production render.

3. Even if vendors claim to use SSS in their skins, differences in quality are huge, and sometimes you even find very funny constructions in their materials. I have learnt to use Snarlygribbly's (free) EZSkin on any human skin I use, because it gives the best results ever.

4. I always use true reflection on any material, always. Long gone are the days with fake reflection images, to the trained eye they always look wrong and ugly. So I always have raytracing active, sometimes just one bounce is enough, in reflective environments I turn it up to 2 or even 3 according to the number of reflective surfaces being close to each other.

5. I always, always use a python script to set texture filtering to NONE (or at least CRISP) in any texture image in my scene. And I use Gamma Correction, so I make sure for any image (except bump or displacement or transparency maps) to select 'apply render settings' for Gamma Correction of 2.2 and switch Gamma Correction in the render settings.

There are a number of more tweaks possible, don't expect a one click solution. Shader rate and pixel samples.

I never ever complain about render times for my settings. First, during building the scene, I use way reduced pre production settings, which I only change against my final production settings for the final render. Second: Quality always comes at a price. There are hundreds of portrait images posted which are embarrassing in quality, just because people don't want to allow the time for a good quality render. Me, after my scene is set, I start my high quality final render and go to bed. In the morning before I go to work, I save my image, and if I discover it is not even finished I leave the computer alone and save my image after return from work.

Hope I could give some helpful suggestions, cheers from Martin

Poser Pro 2014 GameDev, Lightwave 11.6.3, Blacksmith3D Pro 6, Bryce 7, Carrara Pro 8.5, Reality 4 & LuxRender, Python 2.7 & Wx-Python, UV-Mapper Pro, XFrog 3.5, Paintshop Pro X7, Apophysis 7x64

-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -

Don't render faster than your artistic guardian angel can fly...