You're getting separate but closely inter-related subjects confused.

• Render settings
• Material (nodes / shaders) setup
• Lighting

You will need to illustrate the problems you're having by telling us, using screen shots where appropriate, about how you have these things configured.

What you've described is a general fug of incomprehension. Help us to help you: for a start, which version of Poser are you using?

If you load up either of the large ground planes in the Promitives folder, you can use the morphing brush to create hills and valleys; I've used this method to create everything from ploughed fields to fairly complex terrains with high hills, valleys and riverbeds. I use a Wacom Bamboo for this, it becomes quite intuitive after a few minutes of practice.

I have a script by "gishzida" (which states that it "is based in part upon a Script by SVDL and a python script by JLK"), so you could go searching for that. It finds any and all AO material nodes in a scene and deletes them, so it's a bit of a blunt weapon.

It is literally about 20 lines of python script but I can't post it because it's not my work.

EDIT: I should have searched here first (and so should you).

Quote - Levanah is correct, you need to link the DAZ My Library folder to Poser for DSON to work properly.

So that it appears as a Runtime in the Poser Library, right?

EDIT: OK ignore that, that is what Levanah showed.

I always thought Godzilla was a she... so Queen of the Monsters.

But this looks interesting, I must check out some of the links you posted.

I'm pretty sure that when she was first launched, it was at a time when DAZ weren't supporting versions of Poser newer than 6. That was way back in 2006 when the schism between Poser and Daz Studio wasn't as wide as it is now, but was starting to develop.

"Officially" then, V4 has never been supported beyond Poser 6. Daz, of course, are pushing Genesis 2 rather than V4 but I imagine there is still some support for DS users.

Smith Micro obviously have no obligations whatsoever as far as V4 is concerned: she's not their product.

Unofficially... have a trawl through the marketplace here, note the amount of new content being released for V4, and draw your own conclusions.

Very recently I made another attempt at using DAZ stuff; I uninstalled my old DAZ applications and Gensis content and installed Daz Studio, DSON and Genesis 2 starter content from scratch using the Daz Install Manager. When I'd finished the process I reached the point where I could load Genesis 2 male in Poser OK but Genesis 2 female loaded only an invisible / blank heap of nothing. 

I wasn't strongly motivated to use Genesis in Poser to begin with, but I had a little time on my hands so decided to see what would happen. It turned out to be a long-winded process with exasperating results.

Coincidentally I noticed this utility at D3D's web site a couple of days ago. I haven't tried it yet so I don't know if / how it works, but it sounds like it could help.

You need to lose the artistic pose and dramtic lighhting. A neutral pose with fairly flat lighting would be more suitable for initial assessment.

You can expand your options for rendering and lighting quite affordably:

Reality 3 is around $28 in the store here, there's a bit of a learning curve but it can produce beautiful results. 

Vue Frontier is $99, or you can download Vue Infinite PLE for free.

If SM would make Poser's lighting just a little more sophisticated and do something with the way atmospheric effects are controlled (the current options are almost unusable), I might never have to use anything except FireFly.

There's been a spate of posts recently moaning about Poser's lack of ability in all kinds of areas, and comparing it unfavourably to other 3D programs.

Here's something to bear in mind: Poser 10 will cost you $129 (if you buy today at SM's website).

At the risk of stating the obvious: if you want the (undoubtedly superior) capabilities of programs like Vue, Marvellous Designer, 3DS Max etc. you'll have to buy them, and you'll pay double, treble, maybe 25 times what you paid for Poser.

Quote - I've never quite understood the burr under one's saddle that the Poser legacy content seems to represent for so many people who apparently don't use them anyway.

Normally I don't care either, but in the context of making life easier for new users, a lot of the legacy stuff is counter-productive. Noobs might reasonably suppose that content bundled with the software would show Poser's capabilities to the full. Stuff created in Poser 5 or 6 can look spectacularly awful when used by the uninitiated in Poser 10.

If it can't be done by SM in-house, hire someone who knows what they're doing to put together a collection of up to date shaders and .mt5 files, sensibly categorized as 'metals', 'glasses', 'liquids', 'stone' etc. Make these much easier to find than the crappy old legacy shaders. Then get an intern / child / trained monkey to go through the standard characters and props and apply those shaders where and as appropriate.

Ditch all those horrible old light sets which are completely useless now that we have IBL, IDL and GC. In fact, it's time to rationalize all the legacy stuff: either adapt it for modern versions of Poser or let it go.

You could create an .MC6 file for the figure with its existing texture, open that in a suitable text editor (Notepad ++ is very good - and free), use its search and replace function point to the new image files, save the edited .MC6 file (under a different name) and apply that to the figure.

If you have to ask 'how do I do that?' or 'which images do I change?' then this method isn't for you.

Once you get used to the idea and realise that the tools you need are right there in Poser, 'imperfecting' all sorts of things can become anything from a trivial task to a rewarding creative endeavour.

So stop whining and being lazy. Get off your backside and go and mess up a trash can.