First I believe I'm at fault, but I can't duplicate the look in the ad. The lips and skinlost all detail and the lips so shiny they look like plastic. I'm trying to get used to Poser 7, I had been using Poser4 with propack, so I'm still struggling.

I loaded V4 added the mat, change the quailty up and rendered it in Firefly, but got a poor result.

Does any one have an idea as what I'm doing wrong?

maybe yer using texture filtering on the skinmap, as well as bad lighting (nostril glow). try an IBL with AO instead.

Hi Miss Nancy ???? I haven't altered any settings and I don't know what an IBL or AO is.

I attached a copy of the ad.

post a screencap of materials room, head (face) skin settings. promo render appears to have no hair shadows, but skin detail is evident.

I think your primary problem is bad lighting, harsh lighting and not enough fill, will blow out the detail in the textures and make the highlights too strong. the promo render you are showing has at least 3 lights, if not more which are much more ballanced.

Attached is the material screenfor the lips. I was able to get a better skin texture but the lips still look to shiney.

Heres what I get now. wdpre, I lightened it in photoshop, but the lips are still too shiney.

yeah the material has overkill in the specular in my opinion which you can even see in the promo, so it must have been intended. it has both specular and alternate specular set which really makes the specularity strong. I personally would remove the anisotropic node in the alternate specualar and just go with the standard specular, adjusting that strenth as needed, I think I would also up the bump on the lips to .006 or thereabouts.

check image map nodes to see if texture filtering is enabled. does "phily" refer to philadelphia?

The lights also need to be adjusted.

Modify your lights so that you have the following:

Light 1 set to white (1.000, 1.000, 1.000), with intensity set to 125%
Shadow set to 1, Map Size set to 1024. Light type should be infinite.
Should be to the left (about 45 degrees)

Lights 2&3 set to grey (0.500, 0.500, 0.500) with intensity set to 100%
Shadow set to 1, Map Size set to 256. Light type should be infinite.
One on each side of the figure (one at 60 degrees, the other at -60 degrees).

Just say NO to default lighting :)

I'm a bit slow with Poser 7. It's a lot different from Propack. I'm going to try all the things suggested, it may take time for me to figure them out. Please bear with me. Much thanks for everyones help.

Yep Miss Nancy, Phily is for Philadelphia.

yeah, I useta know a guy from philly. big guy, shaved head, goatee, rode a harley with a sock-full-o-nickels to swing at SUV-driving road hogs on the highway. well, I didn't actually know him in person, just went to his newsgroup and website, but I dropped out after awhile. anyway, post a screencap of render settings, as yer settings appear to be bad, as well. one other thing: if these vendors are gonna use promo renders that a newbie user can't duplicate, then said vendors should provide a pz3 file with the settings needed to duplicate the promo render. if they refuse, then don't buy anything from them and/or demand yer money back.

Here's my render settings, but I'm having more problems

Heres the figure I put together, I do all the parts of a scene seperarely becauseI keep getting error messages... 

Such as...

and the image then looks like this...

I have a PC 2.4 gh, intel duo 2 chip,with 3.24 gigs of ram, and a 1000 gig hard drive. I don't know what I'm doing wrong,. There should be plenty of speed, ram and rom. Things lock up on just the single figure with clothes!!!!

The V3 figure, mats, clothes, props all render . The V4.1 figure,with  V4 clothes, mats  etc seem to lock things up.

I hate to be the one in the thread who says "spend money"  but I can't recommend the new carrara 3d express enough for rendering.  Rendering in Poser is a nightmare.  I got it for $20.00.  Don't feel like it's all you.  ALOT of it is the program being a pain in the butt!  

Wish I could help more, but I can sympathize and tell you that at one point I was exactly where you are (especially rendering in different parts) and C3de solved all those problems for me.

I am:  aka Velocity3d 

A couple of things that might help. For a closeup, try to switch to manual settings and then aquire settings from auto and change the min shading rate to something lower. I normally run at .01 for detail work. Try to render all of the parts. It could be that something is actually missing and causing the error (not even in the skin), it just might have issues.

I changed the V4.1 to V4.0 and now it renders. Im adjusting the settings, wish me luck. 

o.k., good luck. 0.5 shading rate is good enuff for now, but drop it down lower for better tex detail. turn off texture filtering. zoom in on the shadowcams (reduce scale) to get proper shadow definition, or just dump FFRender and switch to carrara, which uses poser figures and does good renders by default.

I have a very powerful machine too, but the failure to reload textures error occurs for me now and then after I've had a complex scene open for awhile and run some renders.  I believe the experts have reported that Poser fails to release memory as you go along and run through processes like rendering.  I've found that for memory intensive scenes, it is best to save before rendering (always a good idea anyway).  If you get the texture reload error, you can just exit Poser (dumping the memory load), re-enter Poser and reload the scene.  That always works for me.  Another trick I've used to hang in there a little longer in a given session is to set the display to outline or wireframe BEFORE you render (so it doesn't have to load the textures again for the working display when it returns to Preview mode).  

No complex scene, what you see above , a figure, dress, hat, parasol, shoes, plus the charactormorph and mat., thats all that there is. 

Complexity may not be the right word.  Basically, it's a high memory load, which many people hit with they try to create "complex" scenes with lots of scene elements.  But you can burden even powerful computers with a few figures which have high poly counts and high rez textures.  And again, since Poser apparently does a poor job of managing memory use, it seems one can run out after a certain number of renders.  And of course, it depends on your hardware too (e.g., how much RAM you have, swap file size, etc).  That looks like a high poly figure so I can easily imagine your scene hitting the memory limits after rendering for awhile.  Like I said, you can just exit Poser and reload the scene and it should work again.

Also, you can cut back on the raytrace bounces.  Four is usually more than you need. 

You can also make lower resolution versions of the textures and use those instead. A 2000x2000 texture uses just 1/4 the memory of a 4000x4000 one. If you're not doing an extreme close up you can't see the difference anyway.

Just don't accidentally overwrite the high resolution texture map with the low res one. Save it with a new file name, like facematLO.jpg.

in poser, raytrace has no effect on anything but reflection and refraction. there is another variable with which indirect lite bounces (the normal idea behind using ray-tracing for non-reflective surfaces) can be specified, but that is beyond the scope of this forum IMVHO.