I believe Poser 12 and Poser 13 have separate download libraries. You might check that you used the correct downloads runtime and that's also the runtime you're looking at.

What kind of lights are you using?

It was the stories that were judged. While there were some great images too, our focus was on the writing since this was a writing contest.

Congratulations to the winners. There were a lot of great stories.

It's likely that the pallet got hidden behind another pallet that is floating. Or it may have gotten pushed mostly off the screen. Look around the edges of your monitor. If you can't find it buried or tucked behind something else, you can reset your UI.

In one of your old screen shots, I do see a pallet hidden behind your scene

I don't know what that pallet is. but look back there for it. Also, I see you have some of your UI dots set. Try clicking on one of those to see if it helps.

It's hard to say. My first thought is yes, of course. But it depends on your needs and how you use Poser.  Which version are you using currently? Do you use Superfly?

Superfly renders faster and has more post-effects options. It has better GPU rendering support. The animation options have been updated. There's better support for layers in the material room. Walk and Talk designer improvements. There are improvements to copying morphs from a figure to the clothing. Better denoising. You can now set where your render cache and movie cache go, and choose to generate thumbnails when saving to the library so you don't overwrite an existing thumbnail if you're overwriting something in the library.  And there have been a few interface tweaks to make things run a little smoother, but aside from the new launcher, I don't remember what most are. I've gotten too used to them.

To be honest, I keep looking at the original images and I don't see much difference. What do you mean by correct normals? Are you saying they're reversed?

Taken care of

Go to file>options click on the import tab

hit the configure Poser import button

Hit browse. Move to where you have Poser installed.

Pick your Poser folder and then hit the Select Folder button.

I ignored the sdk option because there was only one choice.

Now I pointed it to my Poser 11 install. I had it pointed at my Poser 13 install using the same method but I was getting this error message when I tried to import the scene

I would hit no and it would continue on like there was no problem. It just was annoying so I changed the folder.

The guy was from Poser. It's actually M4. I imported the scene file and did a little shader editing because he was way too shiny. I'm by no means an expert on Vue so he could probably look better, but here is an indication of Poser in Vue

This can be tricky. It will depend on how the wall is UV mapped. (that's the layout of how to fit a flat image on a nonflat surface)

Here is a cube with an image and you can see the image doesn't fit on one side.

If I change the scaling, it fits sort of but the ground area is in the middle of the face

that is because the UV map for this cube looks like this

Each of these grids is one side. This means one of these grids is for the side of the cube we're looking at. The image would have to fit in that grid.

so your poser setup would look like this

Now the theater's back wall would need its own UV map. I don't know what that looks like and looking at the read me, it doesn't list templates being included. You might be able to open the back wall's current texture in Photoshop (or other 2d software) and use that as the template if you can figure out what section the wall is. Then save that as a new image and apply it.

The face camera is always oriented on the selected figure. If it isn't, use the camera restore to put it back (this also goes for the pose right-hand and left-hand cameras). For the other cameras, you might have to back it up a bunch to see something in the scene to help orient it again. It might help to restore those too, but that will depend on where your stuff is in relation to where the camera originally points.

if you don't remember how to restore a camera, select the camera and then go to edit>restore>camera (or press command,shift, h)

I"m not sure  Faery_Light's problem. She may need to contact support

It's difficult to judge the lighting of a render by what the preview looks like. There's a limitation of 6 or 7 lights that can be displayed in the preview. Your best bet if you think you need a lot of lights is to do low-quality test renders on a small scale. even the 10 or so you mention seems excessive but it will depend on the look you're going for and how bright you have them