vilters - Thanks man! This is what i was looking for.

aRtBee - Ahhh ok. Thanks for these tips. I'll keep them in mind when i'm messing with these material nodes.

Gremalkyn: Yeah looking to get a look similar to her face.

edit i did a random search and found a picture with what i'm looking for. Notice how the shine on his body is a bit greasy/speckled. What would i do in the material room to achieve a similar look?

As far as i can tell, there's no transmapped objects in front of his eyes.

Ok, i changed the subsurface scattering to .5, no difference.

I turn off subsurface scattering, no difference.

I increase the shadow blur radius to 4, and it softens the edges, but stil the eyes are very dark and bottom of the eyes show the same darkness.

I decrease the shadow itself down to .2. This fixes the eyes and brightens them, and lightens the bottom of the eyes. While this works, it makes the shadows in other areas too bright, and this would seem counter to having ray-traced shadows because the value is so low.

With depth-mapped shadows, i don't have this problem. I'm not sure what else to look at. Are ray-traced shadows really better than depth-mapped shadows? Because so far i'm seeing better effects of DMS on faces than ray-traced.

I'm gonna test the shadow min bias change and see if that has any effect. Where do i go to see my SSS scaling value?

The other problem is not just the artifacts under the eyes, but the eyes themselves are too dark. With depth map shadows, the eyes are nice and bright, but in raytracing, the eyes always come out too dark.

I'm using Poser Pro 2012.

The character i created using Michael 4 morphs with props and textures. Everything else in poser i'm pretty comfortable with, but the lighting/shadows are giving me a real headache :( I would always use depth-mapped shadows if i could get them to come out crisp on backgrounds, but everyone keeps saying ray-traced is better, but i'm running into problems with them on people's bodies.

With depth map shadows, the shadowing is always good on characters faces. However, with raytraced shadows, it comes out looking bad. The eyes are usually too dark and notice the polygons under the eyes. What am i doing wrong here?

Here is a comparison between depth map shadows and raytraced shadows on the face. The position of the light is exactly the same for both images. The render settings are exactly the same.

Thanks for all the tips guys. What kind of starting light sets do you recommend i build for the average render. A few sets that i read from tutorials included the 3-point lighting system, with an infinite light as the key light, a back light, and a side light with either infinites or spotlights. Another one i seen uses one diffuse IBL, a key light, and one spotlight either to the side/back. And should i use HDR files for both my diffuse IBL image map and the environment sphere?

LaurieA: Yeah i was testing out a few renders with IDL lighting. At first i was scared because i thought IDL would take forever to render. But to my surprise, the renders were very fast, and i liked the results a lot. I'm gonna have to experiment more with baggins enironment sphere and hdr maps.

hborre: That looks really nice man. So the basic rule of thumb is start with one light and work from there? Even though i've only been using poser for like a month or so, i'm starting to see that lighting pretty much can make or break a picture.

Yeah i don't use default lights in my renders, i was just using them here to test out raytracing. My original problem was the raytraced shadows were too hard, with lines on his chest. Now i think i might have upped the shadow blur radius too high. But other than the lights/render settings (i use manual as well but was using this for test purposes), do the raytraced shadows look ok or how they're supposed to look like?

Btw thanks for all the help. I pretty much got this working because of you guys.

Here's my light settings for that current light.