Just thought I would bring this to your attention before someone starts squawking. If you bought the M3 Universal textures (HiRes) you will see that there is a mismatch in the tone of the body and head. Don't panic - it is easy enough to correct. I have already emailed this to DAZ, so they don't need to be bombarded with other notices. See the image posted here for tips to correct this - there are other solutions (such as creating a shaded blend area in the neck) but these numbers should get you started. BTW, the brightness and contrast values are on a +- 255 units scale so if your paint program uses +- 100 units you will have to make adjustments. Please don't be too hard on DAZ - they really did a great job on this texture (and on M3 in general), and this is an easy enough mistake to make. It won't even show in many renders, but here is the fix if you need it.

Is this just in P5? The reason I ask is that I went and looked at all the promos at Daz and did not see a problem in the neck area at all on them.. I do not have time to render him out just now in P4 cause I am on my way out the door .. just a thought any way..

I checked this in PP and P5, under global lighting, and could not see any mismatch.

Yes - glad you mentioned P4 - I checked and it works fine there, so I went back to P5, and the first render I did looked good, but after swapping the texture to another (via MAT pose) and then back to the M3 Universal (using the MATs that came with it), the difference showed up again. It might be the same problem I have seen before where P5 does not properly update after swapping with MAT poses made for P4. Very bizarre that P5 would treat the head texture differently from the body texture, but that is what it seems to have done. I wanted to make a P5 MAT pose anyway to get the bump maps properly set up. Thanks everybody - seems that the texture is fine - its just another P5 anomaly!

If you are using p5 make sure your bump maps are set on both head and body, I don't know why but the bumps make the texture a bit darker. of course i don't have the texture so i don't even know if there are bump maps involved lol

Keep in mind that MAT poses were a hack from the beginning. Someone found out that partial pose files containing only material settings would overwrite the current material settings in the scene and use such partial pose files for storing materials. However, this has never been an documented or advertised feature in Poser, so use it with the same caution as the cross-talk "feature". If you read the Poser 5 manual (p 127 in the printed edition) it will tell you that CL will not provide support for MAT poses and related problems. The problem that you see with Poser 5 is that Poser 5's material system is significantly different from Poser 4 (and IMO vastly superior). Poser 5 will read Poser 4 materials from pz3 and cr2 files just fine, but there's on guarantee that hacks like MAT files will work in it too. MAT files rely on undocmented Poser 4 behavior, they're built on sand.