When I first got PP2012, I noticed some of my figures who had blonde hair seemed to have issues.  The figures rendered fine in previous versions of Poser, but when opened in the newer Poser versions, with identical settings, the blonde hair would render with excessive shadowing and would actually create these blotchy smudge shadows.  Oddly it was only visible with blonde hair for the most part and after discussing it with Bill Baggins and a few others [several years ago] I eventually just started working around the problem and hoping for a fix in later versions.  Fixes have not been forthcoming.  And while a few people expressed that they had similar issues, the majority of people don't seem to be able to repeat this glitch.  If you want to see a sample of the problems I was having, see the attached image link.

Bug by JAG Poser Work In Progress

Anyways, long story short, I finally discovered a fix for this.  Like most old timers in Poser, I still like to plug my textures into the diffuse color block on the materials tree.  And I don't like adding a lot of nodes to my hair props and figures, so I've never updated my basic hair presets whereas I have updated my figures and clothing figures to incorporate subsurface scattering and the like over the years.  Essentially I've updated my figure skins...but never quite changed my hair settings for a good five or six years.  Somewhere along the way, Smith apparently changed the way that diffuse color section works and I was unaware of it.

So how do you fix it?  Plug your texture image into the ALTERNATE DIFFUSE section rather than the color.  Your texture will now render much differently, and the weird shadowy crud goes away.  It will render looking normal.

Anyways, just wanted to share the discovery with everyone in case anybody out there is still an old-school dummy like me still trying to use Poser7 materials in PP2014.  Ha, ha.  Why it took this long for me to think about trying that, I don't know.  I just always assumed the texture was the texture...and shouldn't really matter which of the two diffuse plugs I used.  Apparently it makes a big difference in regards to transparent objects when going from PP2012 to 14.