Cath, is there a way to adapt your fur displacement tutorial for animals where there isn't a separate nose material from the rest of the skin?  Im asking because if you use the fur displacement then the nose will disappear.

Well, i'm not Cath (and don't have nearly as cute an avatar!), but I think I can answer the question...

If you have any kind of image-editing software, break it out and open up the texture map of the animal in question. Make a new layer. Use the magnetic lassoo (or equivalent) to select the nose area. ON the new layer, painth this area white. Now invert your selevtion, and fill it with black. Flatten this image, and save it as mask.jpg.

Now, back in Poser, add a blend node at your displacement level, in between the root node and your displacement sub-material. In input 1, colour it white, and plug in your displacement nodes. In input 2, colour it black - no need for further inputs. In the blend input, connect it to an image map, with your mask.jpg texture in it. Set the blend input to 1. This will make all the areas coloured black on your mask retain the displacement info, whilst keeping your nose clear of any bumpiness.

This kind of masking can be used in all osrts of situations where you want one part of a material zone to have a different material structure to the other. The most common use is as a transmap, but they can be used to contorl diffuse, specular, reflections - in fact, anything within the material room.

Hope this helps.

JonTheCelt

Thanks for the help :)

Sorry Jeremy, I was out for business for some time, but I see you got a wonderful answer :)
you can do everything you wish, not even the displacement but even a partial reflections on the textures.. as said above by JonTheCelt..
:)