John, thank you.  That worked exactly as I was looking for.   It makes perfect sense now.  Instead of fighting with the cloth position and scale, just let the cloth room do all the work and follow the morph.  Thanks again!

Thanks Phil, you are right.  That has worked well for me in the past, but unfortunately It won't work for my dynamic cloth items.  I'm starting to think that what I am asking of the cloth room is a little too much for the program to handle. 

I converted my morphs to a FBM, because I made some custom changes with the morphing tool.  I then pulled the geometry out of the cr2 with cr2Editor, and built a new .pz2 that looks like yours.  That way I could import my custom geometry as a FBM, since it obviously isn't in any of the DAZ morphs.  The only real difference I see between yours and mine is that I used "body" as the actor, instead of "head."  Do you think that would be the issue? 

That's new, I didn't know you could do object manipulation with the 3D mice.  I looked at the Space Navigator a while back, but it looked like it could only do view manipulation.  I'll have to take another look at it.  

Good thought on the mannequin, by the way. 

I went ahead and put the computer together.  Athlon II X4 630, that I can overclock and swap out for the new 6 core when the prices come down a little.  4 GB of ram because it is easy and cheap enough to stick in another 4 later.  Win 7 64 bit Pro.  And a Radeon HD 5670 that later on I can add another and Crossfire them.  Not a true powerhouse, but the purpose was to build something a little cheaper just to get me back into a desktop, then be able to keep up to date with upgrades, unlike my laptop.  My workflow time in Poser has decreased dramatically with having a true graphics card.  I think the only next best upgrade would be to find a monitor where I can just stick my hands through the screen to manipulate objects instead of having to drag everything around with the mouse, lol.  Renders sped up a lot, but IDL is still giving me huge headaches.  To be honest though, I haven't spent much time in Poser, what with exploring all the games I can now run. :)

RobynsVeil, I did forget to mention that stuff.  I stay on top of my system and keep it pretty clean.  And I get the slowdowns even on a fresh Windows install.  It is sounding to me like you guys aren't experiencing these slowdowns, leading me to believe it is time for a hardware upgrade.  No biggy, it is time anyway.

Thefixer, I agree with you 100 percent about RAID1.  Lucky for me though if I lose a few hours worth of files it won't cost me anything.  Or I may just plop an SSD in there for a second drive.  I found out this morning that is called JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks).  The last time I built a computer it was called having two hard drives.  Did I just date myself?  Or I may say heck with it all and not worry about it, since I have a car-zilla I want to get back on the road and out to the race track and I don't want to get too involved with the new computer and lose focus on that.

Thank you ladies!  I was thinking the GPU may have been my problem.  I remember playing games with the graphics cranked no problem, but as soon as I turned on the shaders (older games, you don't even have that option anymore lol) they were unplayable even with everything else turned down.

Mackis3D, good call on the RAM.  I went and checked the system requirements and sure enough, 2GB for 64-bit.  I have used the Win7 beta and RC, both 64-bit, and neither was any slower than or gave me any more problems than Win XP.  Interesting.  Either way, yes, I will be going to 8 GB later on.

Thefixer, I was planning to use RAID0.  I have my runtime and anything I create backed up externally, so failures wouldn't have been a concern.  With that said though, I really don't have any experience with RAID.  The last time I looked at it the process was still new to the consumer market, and was seen more as a toy for gamers and hardcore computer people.  

Can you elaborate what you said about RAID0?  I was under the impression that is the mode that slices any R/W operations between two drives, effectively giving the user one drive at twice the capacity and speed.  I was thinking that would help my load and save times, but I may just be paranoid because of what I am experiencing now.  And not to hijack my own thread, but I can't remember if there are any tools or python scripts to pull all that extraneous fluff out of a file, and 300+ MB is a lot to process and write to disk when I am ready to get on to the next thing.

Quote - It's simple math: if the rest of the shader (diffuse, specular, etc.) produces color A, and the ambient value is color B, then the output is A + B.

You got me there.  Somewhere along the way I forgot that everything behind the monitor is 1s and 0s and math.  When I started thinking about it that way things started coming together.  And no more wondering why Poser wouldn't do what I want it to do, lol.

I initially plugged another copy of the texture into the ambient color, but the ENTIRE texture became ambient.  So I should just convert the texture to black and white before I plug?  I can do that.  Will be a while though, as I am in the middle of re-doing my OS.  Got a new version of some old software that for whatever reason doesn't play nice with 64-bit.  No matter, I don't have Poser Pro so I can't use the extra bittage anyway. 

That worked for me, thanks!  I think I even understand it.  Using a math node, black = zero so nothing happens with the black parts of the texture. 

I was messing around with this and got some nice results (testing, so nothing post worthy) with glowing props.  But how could I make only portions of the texture glow?  For example a glowing flame paint job on a car.  I added an ambient node to my material, using an image map for the texture.  I tried blacking out and whiting out in a photo editor the part I don't want to glow, but it just overwrote the underlying texture.  Even tried making a png with the non-glowing part empty, but it just overwrote with white.

 Whoa.  3 minutes time and that solved my problem.  Thanks BB.

I looked at VSS before, but at the time it was over my head so not much of the readme stuck with me.  Guess it's time for another look.  Thanks! 

Well, I just had an epiphany.  I went into the advanced materials tab and noticed the nodes are vastly different between the different characters.  I guess that's why I have been seeing different results with different figures under the same lights and render settings.  Which leads me to the question, once I have a material setup that I like, is there any way to can use that node setup between figures without having to do it manually?  Either inject the material node setup into an existing material, or save it as a base and inject the jpgs for different characters into it.  Having to do it manually for 30-40 material groups per figure can get pretty time-consuming.

As a side note, if anyone has an Android phone and is familiar with the Windows remote desktop protocol, I stumbled across some apps on the market that let you log into it.  It's full-blown pocket-sized Poser on the go!  Just thought I'd share. 

Quote - @bagginsbill

Quote -

...More's the pity - it would be very helpful to me when illustrating lighting tutorials if those lamp cans and flaps actually would render as part fo the scene...

Did I get it right? You would like to have the spotlight geometry visible in render for demonstrating for example the position of the light?

That would be possible. It is not a one click solution and I tried it just quickly now. So I don't know if this would affect the spotlight when you change for example the Angle end. Since I just imported the spotlight geometry (after extracting the .obj out of the .obz with winrar) and parented it to the real spot light that is casting the purple light.

I made a quick render with this imported geometry of a spot light (there is a sceond spot in the scene which just only points at the spotlight geometry so that it is visible and not black).

No, I guess I was misleading on it.  I was wondering why my renders with that set turned out good without much effort on my part, and thought those dials had something to do with it.