I'm so glad I asked about quad core. I had no idea you could set Poser for 4 threads on a dual-core machine. I'm changing it right now. That's fantastic.

Thanks everyone!

Funny how you can look at something and look at something and not see it. Thank you.

I have to take a break, walk the doggie, then see if I can slog this out.

Here's the render...

Shader is next.

Didn't work. I put exactly the same shader on the face as the lip minas the pink color and saw no difference in the outline. I've refined the top of the lip to match the edge of the lip material so that isn't bad now. But the corners of the mouth are still sharp. I have to stop for a bit. Too tired. But I'll be back...

Nope! Color me stupid!

I'm doing it right now.

I'm on the verge of consuming an entire giant bag of M&M's and Habeniero Chips and then going for a job at KMart. Help!

I've got this shader going and have now totally confused myself, my eyes have crossed and I still have this miserable hard line on the lip. So the simple method didn't work so I thought I would try to really complicate it to see if that would work. Right...

There's just something here that I'm not getting. My lip mask is made from the tex template and blurred. Making it larger or smaller doesn't help.

The problem here is that , while I can resort to using texture maps with lipstick on them, they still won't have any gloss because I have been so careful to eleminate any hightlights or shadows from the map. There's nothing I hate worse than seeing white junk on a rendered lip because the texture has a highlight on the lip. It looks like the character has a serious case of chapped lips or scurvy or something worse! And the hard line of the gloss is just unacceptable.

Sydney's lip material doesn't cover the entire lip of my figure. I don't remember this happening before, but it's not stretching. Maybe it's not supposed to, I just don't know.

So, the problem is, how do I blur the lip? Your's works, mine doesn't. Why?

And no, I didn't make this up. It came from looking at a bunch of shaders and trying to figure out how to get a good blur. The Blinn shader is on the other skin parts of my figure. I like it and it's going to stay. The rest is my attempt to add the lip mask and get it to work.

And why hasn't anyone come up with a book on shaders so that one can look up a Blinn node and find out what excentricity means? I know that Blinn is excentric but I thought that just applied to me. In this case is excentric literal? It's like finding someone who can really explain Photoshop blending modes in a way that's easy to understand.

And another bone to pick. Someone said that shaders are "only math". That doen't help someone who's last math class was algebra in Junior High and uses a calculator to cook. Well I do understand add, subtract and multiply. Anything beyond that is a muddle.

Please don't tell me there aren't any shadows. I know they're not there. Too long to render. This isn't final, it's just to get the lip fixed so that I can get this working. Shader posted first, figure second.

All upgrades installed and this is the first time I've had any program close with Ctrl+z. This has only happened using the Morph tool. That's enough to keep me from using it. This probably should be a bug report to the Poser powers that be.

This is like Christmas and a little overwhelming. And incredibly generous! My lip mask is still not working but that's OK because now I have to figure out why Poser 7 closes when I hit Ctrl+Z.

And there is nothing but the texture and not refined yet. No bump or anything else. I just stuck the texture map into the bump node. And somebody else shoved flashlights up her nose.

But what I like is that all it takes is a little color change in the difuse and  a little more bump and she has on lipstick!

bagginsbill, thanks so much for the shadow info. I'm cramming as much as possible into this wee brain as fast as possible.

Note: I just discovered Matmatic and the list of resources posted here. It's in the second sticky on first page of Poser Forum. Now I just need time to wade through it all.

Also, is your AMUCFS available? Is it commercial? I have Apollo and would love to see your shader system for him.

My problem with the lips is Me. I'm having trouble getting the blur right on the mask. Yep, I discovered that you don't have to make separate textures at all for the lips if you want to add makeup. Makes a texture package a lot lighter. And there "glow" works just fine.

I'm also having trouble with Sydney's lip texture mapping. Maybe this happens with all characters that have a separate map for lips but I don't remember having the problem before. I make a morph and enlarge the lips and the head texture is fine but the lip map doesn't cover the entire lip. I'll post a pic as soon as I reboot. Poser went kookoo on me.

Also I'm not very far along with textures for these characters yet. Just getting started there.

I took everything off and left just the bump on the eyeball and put glossy on the eyetrans. The example is with the glossy attached just to the alternate specular. I tried it with the glossy  also attached to the transparency and got a much sharper highlight. I like the softer one so just attached to alternate spec.

This is the first time I've ever understood what Anistrophic is for. That's the best explanation I've seen for how to do the eyes. I was so stuck and now I can go try to figure out how to get my lip mask to work. (It doesn't).

Now I'm wondering if using Ambient Occlusion will give me a shadow underneath the eyelashes. I've seen a fake shadow on eyemaps and don't know if that's the way to go for people who want to still use P4 renderer.

Thank you so much for helping. I'm not new to the material room but just dumb about it. Maybe someday I can get to the point where complicated setups don't totally confuse me. (g)

Oh Good! I'm glad someone replied. Were you using PRPC to open files in Poser?

Go look at the hair for Jessi at Content Paradise by Jolly.