Now I've set the Subsurface Colour to red which will contrast with the base colour, and set Subsurface to 1. I've ignored the other settings for now. The SSS has swamped the base colour, so 1 may be a little high ...

Now for a change of scene to look at SSS using this node. I've switched to the Stanford Dragon model, and this scene has a single area light placed behind and to one side of the mesh (as you can see from the shadow). The Ground material settings have stayed the same to keep bounced light contributions down.

First I've set up a basic non-metal material and rendered it -

The Clearcoat setting provides another specular layer on top of the material, as if it were wrapped in clear plastic. This material blends two Principled BSDF nodes using Clearcoat and Tinted Specular using a Cycles Layer Weight node set to Facing as a mask.

The Specular Tint setting is not physically correct, but is included for artistic control if needed. All it does is to colour the base reflectance by the Base Colour setting, but the fresnel reflections remain white.

Now the Roughness has been set to 1, and the highlights are far more diffused. The amount of reflection is still the same though.

Base reflectance is not the same as fresnel reflections. These are reflections that occur when the light hits the material at grazing angles, and the beauty of this node is that it handles these automatically. No need to even think about them. In this scene setup the fresnel effect can be seen on the side of the cylinder as the light here is coming from behind the prop and hitting it at a sharp angle. The smaller highlight at the top centre of the cylinder is caused by the second area light in front of the prop, and therefore shows base reflectance.

This brings up another important property - Roughness. The physics are clear that as the angle of light hitting a surface approaches 90 degrees the reflectivity of that surface will approach 100%. This means that all surfaces behave like mirrors when the light hits them at grazing angles. But while the science might state this, it’s not what I see in the real world - a dead leaf never appears mirror-like no matter what angle I turn it to the light. Why not?

The answer is that the surface of the leaf is rough at a microscopic level. If you could see it in enough detail it would look like a mountain range, and the light gets caught, trapped and bounced around deep in the valleys. It cannot escape easily, or by the same route it arrived. Mirrors are smoother, and the smoother the surface the lower the chances of the light being trapped, and the easier it becomes for it to escape and bounce back in a straight line.

Therefore roughness is extremely important when defining a material. If the geometry defines the primary shape of an object, and the visible surface relief is defined by bump/normal/displacement, then the roughness defines the invisible surface relief, which has a huge effect on how the light is treated when it hits it.

The amount of light that falls on a surface does not change, so the amount of light reflected back from it does not change, but the greater the roughness, the more diffused and dull the appearance of that selected light.

Here the setup is the same but Roughness has been changed from 0.5 to 0.05 -

And a simple non-metallic material -

Next I want to talk about Specular as it was key for me when I was trying to understand the difference between Superfly and Firefly.

Specular in Firefly is a hack - it is used because raytraced reflections in FF, especially blurred reflections, are extremely slow to render, so specular is a means of faking them. Superfly however does raytraced reflections on everything all the time, which is why when compared like for like it is much faster than FF. Specular in SF is base reflectance (this can also be called direct reflectance or F0).

Base reflectance is the amount of light that bounces back to you from a material if you shine a light (imagine holding a torch) straight at it. With metals, this is high, with values around 60-100%. With non-metals the range is around 2-8%, with a few gemstones going as high as 16%, so the average for the vast majority of materials is 4%.

The Specular chip on the Principled BSDF appears to map 0-1 as 0-8% base reflectance, so at 0.5 it should be set to 4% for non-metals which will be good enough for a wide range of materials. This reflected light will be white.

When the Metallic is set to 1 it will override this Specular setting. The reflectance will be set to 100% and the reflections will be coloured by the Diffuse chip.

What all this means in practice is that most of the time Specular on the Principled BSDF can be left at the default 0.5 - and if the material is a metal, set that to 1 and forget about Specular. Simple!

So here’s a simple metal -

The first thing I'd like to point out is that as the Principled BSDF is an individual node it is easy to blend between multiple materials using a mask. The setup below is very simple but the concept is the same no matter how many materials and masks (procedural or image-based) are used.

Two complete materials are defined; a mask is defined using a Poser Tile node; a Poser Blender node is used to tell the render engine which material to render according to the values taken from the mask (a Cycles Mix node with the mask plugged in to the Fac chip could also be used).

(This scene uses a black material on the Background material zone of the Poser Ground, and a mid-grey on the Ground zone as I want to keep bounced light way down. There are two area lights, one in front and to the side, and one behind the prop. The prop itself is a simple rounded cylinder I made with a couple of levels of render subD applied.)

I think that Pose Symmetry - Custom allows you to specify a frame range ... IIRC.

If you're running 32 bit Poser, isn't there a limit to the RAM it can use, 4Gb or something like that? Even on a 64 bit system?

Superfly uses vertex displacement rather than Firefly's micropoly displacement. Good article here. FF is REYES based, SF is a path tracer - as they work completely differently I would actually build stuff differently to play to the strengths and weaknesses of each - for FF, I'd use 32 bit exr displacement maps with less dense geometry, for SF I'd use more geometry plus subD combined with bump/normal maps for the detail.

La Femme was built to take advantage of Poser's multi-res morphs - the mesh topology is more grid-like and doesn't have as many major density changes compared to other figures. Anywhere there are poles or triangles will give localised pinching at higher subD, and poles with 6 or more edges running into them will give shading artefacts at any subD level.

So yeah - displacement in SF does work kind of like subD morphs but as always seems to be the case with 3D there isn't a single 'best' approach, and context matters ;)

Have a look at the section in the manual called Using Dependent Parameters and Creating Master Parameters (chapter 29, starting on p722). You can use Keyed Dependencies to create new dials to control all sorts of stuff - anything that can be keyed IIRC.

AFAIK GoZ will only send info on the vertex positions - so no go for new groups or UV data. When I've created a figure in the past, after I had the obj file in the Geometries and the cr2 pointed to it, I replaced that obj with a modified version without problems on several occasions. Obviously backups are important ;)

Also, I think the Group Editor in Poser has a mirror option, but I don't have it open right now to check.

My personal opinion is that the colour map is the least important of the lot. Surface relief is the most important and can help when making colour maps - run a height map through xNormal (which is free) to get an occlusion map; convert height to normal, then normal to cavity - then use those maps in Mudbox as masks to add/tweak details. So I would get bump working first - if you have a good bump as a base you could re-use that for multiple characters. If you're using Firefly then I assume you'd be making a specular map; Superfly is a little different, I can go into detail if you want, but that would be the second thing. I'd leave colour til last.

Eyebrows - I assume that you're keeping them on a separate layer in Mudbox? The last time I textured with SP I would tweak a texture, export the map, rename it and overwrite the previous map in the runtime structure I had going, then hit reload textures in Poser to save going through the material room again. I think that if you can get a workflow going that allows making changes and testing them quickly without too much hassle it makes it easier to not get too attached to a particular change, if that makes sense.

When I set up materials in Poser I always use a single white infinite light at 100% intensity with no bounced light, and move the light around a lot and do loads of test renders. I figure that it is the most basic set up there is and if a material works there it'll work under any set up (though haven't done any serious work in Firefly for years now as Superfly has far too many advantages). If I do have bounced light in there I make sure it's neutral - I can't judge things properly if there is a colour cast coming off the light setup.

Also worth using the orthographic cameras (if you aren't already) to get a change from the perspective distortion of the normal cameras, especially for things like judging height of eyebrows.

I really like the Blade Runner type make-ups, more like that would be good ;)