I use a colormath node, set to divide by a light grey or light brown (red) color. If you know the shade you want, you can divide your image by that and select the divisor color from the preview. The darker the divisor (value 2) the lighter the result will be. This will increase the contrast and adjust anything lighter than the divisor above 1, but zero (black) will still be zero.

That looks like texture filtering. It needs to be turned off for all trans maps.

Global coordinates are causing the big circles. That checkbox fixes the patern in P space. If you move the bags, the pattern will flow across them.
I would use the weave node, like bagginsbill said.

hoplaa asked  "Why don't Poser cameras have the capability to orbit around whatever object is currently selected in the scene?".
I only point out that you can selcet an object for the camera to rotate around. I think a selection camera that acts like hand, face or pose cams only on the current selection, could be helpfull.

If you parent a camera to an object or figure it will revolve around it. Except for the ortho cams.

Hi radstorm,
   All of the formentioned features are avalable in the P6 Material Room. Right click on the palette create a new node the math node is under math, the frame number node is under variables and the movie node is under 2D textures.
   Lighting is very sceen specific, the shader (or gel) that I posted was for a point light from a candle animated at 10fps. It was exactly what I wanted but is not the end all of flickering lighting shaders. We can make lights blink, flash, strobe, fade in or out, the possibilities are endless.
   I would love to help you with the math, but I am probably not the person to teach you how to create and hook up the nodes. Please see one of the hundreads of tutorials on the material room (there is a sticky at the top of this forum with lots of links.) Or find Doc Geeps P5 material room tute I think it covers all the basics.
Good Luck,
Gary

Translucent data is not stored in the alpha of a .png, just the transparent. Your backgrounds must match, for the translucent parts to look right. Black on black is the easiest, but if you use black behind your flash and don't have a black background in your sceen, your flash will have a noticable black edge.
If you want complex translucents data, you will need to add the effect to your sceen.
There may be another way around this in paint, that I am unaware of.

Attached Link: Filters

Add a little noise to the offset inputs of the image node.

On the root node of your mirror, near the bottom, uncheck Reflection Lite Mult.

Using the inverse of the AO (Ambient Occlusion) node as displacement might give you some smoothing.

I cropped the lower hand from the seam guide being sure the bottom row of the guide was on the cropped piece, and painted the background red to make the adjustments easier. You can get the location and scale from the ratio of the position and size of the cropped piece with the original; I just tweaked it to fit using the original seam guide and a color math node. It was easy to align using the area render for the fine tuning. Tune M5 first to get the lower left, then both scales to adjust the right and top of the lower image, and then position the top.

You could used 2 images blended together using a blender like B2 but I enjoy the math to much to try that solution.

Thanks,

Gary.

Attached Link: spinning a texture

I apologize if you don’t have the P5 flag, I know it’s a terrible choice, but something that I believe most of us have, it’s also easy to get an alpha from.

Replace the flag with your original image and the step with an appropriate mask (which may need to be connected like the flag). You can replace the simple color with your own skin texture.

The equations are derived from the formula at the attached link.

I added some nodes to make the left tat easier to position.

The nodes labeled centers are for centering the rotation around the center of the image.

The node M 26 is the horizontal center of the uv map. I think it’s close to .393 or .394 for V3.

Good luck with this, it is a daunting task. I hope this tool helps.

Gary.