I'm using Poser 7, and have a few faces and/or figures that are BLACK before I render them.  This makes it impossible for me to change expressions, etc., before I render.  The render comes out fine.  When I click on the diffuse component face, in the materials room, for example,  I'm told there is none.  The highlight component is called BarHead05.  I can't find that anywhere.  The diffuse color is white;  highlight and ambient colors are black.  It is next to impossible to match the face shade with that of the body by darkening the diffuse color.    Any help is appreciated!

Render fine.  Either change the preview display to OpenGL or SreeD, opposite of what you have now.

This is usually caused by not having a texture in the diffuse channel.

Some figure materials are setup to use the ALT_DIFFUSE channel and set the diffuse channel to a 0 value. If this is the case - plug in the texture in the diffuse channel and leave the value at 0. Then the preview should look fine

If that is not the case - show a screencap of the materials for the face. Maybe we can see of something else is not set correctly

Thanks!  I couldn't figure out how to insert an image, because it doesn't have a link.  Just a character I created. 

Quote - Some figure materials are setup to use the ALT_DIFFUSE channel and set the diffuse channel to a 0 value.

Why do they do this?  Is there a benefit to using ALT_DIFFUSE?  Seems like this happens after EZSkin is applied as well...

You can switch from texture display mode to say smooth shaded which might help. Some node based materials dont preview.

What product/freebie are you using ? have you checked for the file using windows search function ?

In the material room right click on the canvas of the materials, the select New Node!2D textures!Image_map. Then click on none and select browse and go find your texture

Then drag the top left corner of the node to the Diffuse Color channel. That will attach an image to the material

I just changed the preview display to sreeD, and it eliminated the black!  The pre-render image is very coarse looking, but the render is fine!  Thanks! 

Quote - > Quote - Some figure materials are setup to use the ALT_DIFFUSE channel and set the diffuse channel to a 0 value.

Why do they do this?  Is there a benefit to using ALT_DIFFUSE?  Seems like this happens after EZSkin is applied as well...

Diffuse and specular give you just those things.  So if I plug another node into a diffuse, it'll be diffusified.  The Alt channels are place holders.

If all you want is plain diffuse, then difuse is fine.  If you want to add SSS or something like that, it isn't.

I had a problem with this using an OBJ recently...I ended up using Sreed as well, as the final thought was the OBJ itself had some normals, duplicate vertices, or some other issue that OpenGL did not like.

@Winterclaw & @wimvdb - thanks for the explanation, that makes sense.

Quote - > Quote - Some figure materials are setup to use the ALT_DIFFUSE channel and set the diffuse channel to a 0 value.

Why do they do this?  Is there a benefit to using ALT_DIFFUSE?  Seems like this happens after EZSkin is applied as well...

The ALT_DIFFUSE channel does not alter its input, it directly transfers it. The diffuse channel takes light and other matters into account. In the nodesetup which plugs into the AltDiffuse, this is already accomplished in the other nodes (and you don't want to apply the light twice!)

Thanks, y'll, for your help!