Poser is sort of a red-headed stepchild that gets passed from company to company
after each one has milked all the profit out of it they think they can get.  So I doubt
any company is going to go through all the trouble of spending the money to hire a
staff to make training materials for a Poser feature that maybe 10% of the Poser
users use.  They are probably just breaking even on the product as it is, especially
considering all the warez versions that pop up within days of a version release.

There are a few tutorials on their website.  That's probably all we are going to get
from them.

http://my.smithmicro.com/tutorials/

Also:

http://my.smithmicro.com/tutorials/

Quote - I stand corrected.. after talking with Co workers here..
I must say that lately we see things that actualy shows illigal Poser files and zips
That have being invected with nasty's ...
And i have read the threads in the links above...
it seems NO solution to the nasty's can be found or given.

See if this helps:

http://www.sophos.com/support/disinfection/jeefoa.html

99% of all species of animals that have ever existed on earth are now extinct.
In fact every other species of humans - the neanderthal, the cro-magnon, homo erectus,
australopithicus - are also extinct. We almost went extinct 70,000 years ago. 
What makes humans so arrogant to think we will last forever.  Going extinct is
just a natural process.

(click on image for a bigger picture)

Quote - I normally don't use points of lights, unless it is a large room scene and the light fills the room.

They are good if you want just a small area illuminated such as simulating
the glow of a candle or a light bulb.  You just need to adjust the Distance Start
and Distance End accordingly.  With a spot light it is too directional and an
infinite light just lights up everything, no control of falloff over distance.

Quote -
What I'm not liking with the lighting is how it's giving the grainy look to where it hits the wall and floor on the right side of the image. The whole tank isn't full of water, so it shouldn't give the grainy light cast on the wall at least because it's only going through the glass there. That and the light going through the back of the tank on the wall feels too "square" I guess. (I know the glass is square...but the side is glass too...)

But I've never done much with point lights so I have no idea what settings would be good or not.

Ah, got it, hadn't even noticed.  You know what it looks like? That the wall has a bumpy surface
and the light is at an angle such that it is highlighting the bumps so what you are seeing
is the peaks and valleys of the surface, with the raised areas being brighter than the low
areas.  So I don't think it's a problem with the light, the light seems to be doing what it
is supposed to.  Could you show a material setting for the wall?  Is the wall supposed
to have a bumpy texture or is the wall supposed to be smooth? Because I am seeing
the same effect to a lesser extent on the entire surface of the wall. It's just the angle
of the other lights aren't as sharp as that of the point light so it isn't as obvious.

Also with the Ray Trace Shadows setting, you might want to play around
with the Shadow Blur Radius and the Shadow Min Bias and see if that helps.

Quote - There are a bunch of us Poser users who get a kick out of doing no postwork. Realistic renders are possible directly out of Poser. The key is doing your lights and shaders correctly. Particularly, the skin shader has to be a bit more than most Poser users deal with.

Count me in as one of them.

I'm no experts, but seeing as no one else is answering , I'll give it a shot.
For your glass and water you might want to plug in the refract node instead of using transparency.
Set all your transparency setting to zero if you do, these interfere with the refract node.
If you use the refract node, set your diffuse color and specular color to black.
These also interfere with the refract and reflect nodes. You will want to put a different index
of refraction for the glass and for the water so they don't blend together.
And the sum of the reflection value and refraction value should equal one.
Say if you have 10% reflection (0.1) you should have 90% refraction (0.9).
To see the lights shining on the glass and water, add a glossy node to
your alternate specular input and set Ks to a low value. say 0.2 or .03.
As you are already using the reflect node, I'm assuming you have ray tracing
enabled in your render settings.

What don't you like about the lights? 

Quote -

edit: BTW I took the opportunity to look at your gallery and was suprised to find it empty. Post some of your PURE work for us to be amazed by please.

I mostly post at the other R website. This one has a better forum and Bagginsbill and Dr. Geep,
so that's why I come here.  But with all their arbitrary rules I long ago gave up posting any renders
here.

Quote -
if you want to know what only Poser can do, you should do check out geep's tutorials and bagginsbill's procedurals.  otherwise, it's hypocritical to equate postwork with cheating, and entirely biased towards what you're personally willing to do to make a render.

Oh I do follow Dr. Geep and Bagginsbill quite avidly.  I love what Bagginsbill did with
matmatic.  In fact I created a shader group for V2 for him to go along with the one he
created for V3, and he was very pleased and appreciative of my efforts. It's not like I'm
some sort of noob that just picked up Poser yesterday. 
Look, I have no problem with people who want to use postwork to pretty up their
pictures.  You and a few others here seem to have the idea I am trying to ban using
postwork.  All I am saying is it is a bit disingenous to pass your work off as a Poser
render when the reason it looks the way it does is because of postwork.  Someone
just coming into Poser starts wondering why his/her renders never come off looking
that good and then gets the idea they have to go out and buy other programs to
bring their work up to snuff.  How about instead we show people what can be
done with Poser and Poser alone? 

Quote - > Quote - I don't think anyone said you couldn't do postwork.  Just that it is a bit dishonest to

put a picture in the Poser gallery that has been postworked when there is a
mixed medium gallery which is intended for postworked renders.
So no, we don't need a new gallery for the gods of poser, that gallery already
exists.  The mixed medium gallery.

If that was the criteria, then good 80-90% of images would have to go to mixed medium category. I think that would suck big time.
To me 'poser' gallery doesn't mean it has to be 100% poser. It would mean more like 'mostly poser'. I always assume that there are other components to images unless someone specifies 'no postwork whatsoever'

Much like any other technique, postwork is another tool, learn to use it to your advantage, and learn when and how to use it.... rather then knocking it down.

I've seen many poser images that would look a lot more visually pleasing with a little bit of postwork.

I guess my point was when I go to a website that has a Poser gallery, I want to see
what Poser is capable of doing.  If I wanted to see what someone was capable of
doing with Photoshop, I'd go to a Photoshop gallery.   
I guess it's sort of like a favorite baseball player breaking the home run record,
and then it's found out he was using steroids.  Postwork is sort of like steroids for Poser.
Yes, the picture may look prettier with postwork, but that doesn't show me what Poser
can do.

Quote - In P6 there is a wireframe figure behind the pose window. IIRC when you keep alt or ctrl pressed an klick on it it changes.

The wireframe figure is in Poser Pro too.  I can get it to change if I hold down Alt and left click,
but Ctrl doesn't seem to have any effect on it.
Also in Poser Pro if I hold down Alt and left click near the center bottom, it toggles
the words POSER 6 on and off.  But again holding down Ctrl has no effect.

Quote - I guess it dissappeared as fast as it appeared.

Apparently they are only part way done with it.
Right now they have a half-FAST version.   :)