I have the same issue. This shows up on layered skin tight on lafemme. The yoga pants (hamelon, I believe). It uses a displacement map to give it thickness and edges. Super nice thought, if it worked. But it doesn't seem to.

Not sure the displacement map was working at all in Poser 11. Setting it to zero in Poser 12 and the renders look pretty much the same.

displacement at 0

displacement at .006 (units are meters), subd=2

nodes:

Firstly, the effect doesn't even look like displacement. I see no geometry change. It looks like a bump map. The shadows are blunt. The displacement map does go smoothly between light and dark.

I also upped the subd=4. Took a bit longer to setup the figure, didn't take any longer in the render.

I want to say there's a very slight displacement visible at the edges. Maybe it only really works with crazy subd'd meshes. Which means it's not a good thing for this. Does it not spot subd the mesh as needed? And, certain distances and values would produce little more than a bump effect anyway. Why bother upping the mesh when the actual deformation is not visible, only the shadowing affect? I'm in pretty darn close, here. The effect is not even visible on this mesh, even at subd=4 from anything other than extreme close up. The mess of a shadow is visible, however, from the International Space Station.

The shadows are still completely out of whack. The lights are ghostship's superfly lights,