from what bagginsbill said it looks like all those dials are for animation.  I think I get what's going on, they are just for light attenuation when animating.  Which would be killer useful doing an animated scene with neon lights, Blade Runner comes to mind, but I guess the three color channels at the top of the parameter box are the only ones that control color during a still render.  And unfortunately I can't do animation, Poser gives me horrendous  fits  with layers and splines every time I try.  So I guess I won't need those extra nodes after all.  At least now I know where they came from.  That had me baffled.

Thanks bagginsbill, that makes sense to me now.  I guess I just got lucky when I was moving the lights around, lol.  From your post I got into the advanced materials properties and started adding nodes to play with.  Then Poser crashed haha.  Restarted and back at it!

Thanks BB!  Now I understand the wrapping the image around for lighting concept.  I went and did a google image search on equrectangular  and came up with some good images to use.  My renders no longer look like loony tunes drawings.

Quote - OK yes, I have the environment sphere, and I've used it a couple of times.  Actually, the environment sphere plus a sun-light, plus IDL makes some very realistic lighting.  I much prefer using equirectangular photos for the lighting too, instead of the light-probe thingys.

I've been tinkering with Poser for a little while now for fun, but with no actual idea what I was doing.  I have just stumbled across some of the more powerful features, like IBL, and found this thread.  What exactly can be used for IBL?  Reason is, I am finding it a lot easier to render over a background image than create a full scene from scratch, and I have it in my head to use that image as the IBL.  Can I do that with just a standard photo, and not a squiggly geometric probe image? It seems to be working for me, but again my knowledge is limited to what I can understand from the forums (lol), and the blurbs of the manual that I can dig through before I get bored and my attention wanders elsewhere. 

I'm good on the morphs, if I just save a pose and check the box for morphs on the second popup that works for me.  The problem I am having is the custom morphs I create using the morphing tool.  I can't get to them.  I have tried spawning a new morph target after I use the morphing tool, then exporting it as an obj and importing it onto my clean figure as a morph target, but Poser likes to crash and burn when I do that, and I'm not sure if I'm even on the right track there.

I think what you said about the materials room will cure the missing files problem I am having.  Except I can't do any more with materials other than loading jpegs and changing colors, so I will have to familiarize myself with that.

Quote - 232bird,
Dimension3D's Morphing Cloth seems to be the best at covering oddball morph combinations.

Thanks!  I'll go check it out.

That was helpful, thanks.  I was running into the same problem.  Doing it with the body dials helped a lot.  I always have to fix the corners and random ridges with the morph tool, but then I can't carry it over to another figure as a pose.   Am I missing some functionality of Poser?

My biggest concern is using clothing.   I don't know if anybody else ran into this, but small breasts or even a petite figure are giving me headaches.  Crazy Belle won't absorb the changes, and even some of the top-notch sets like Jasmina's conform themselves ok, but I am left with a ribcage poking through.  The V4 magnetize poses don't seem to help much, either.

What about applying morphs?  I read something in the included tutorial about importing morphs for objects or parts one by one.  Is that what I do with the stuff from this site?  Character or prop packs, for example. 

 So I have to set kinematics.  Thank you, that was what I was wondering.  I think of this program like a Saab; it's great when you can figure out how to make it work.