I was just saying that the shadows and textures I am seeing while nice, don't look real or accurate (again not intended to be a criticism and didn't mean to sidetrack your thread)They look more drawn to me. The technology used in the render part of poser doesn't claim to be 100% realistic anyway. I feel it is a major challenge to render accurate lighting quickly, but certainly worth attempting. You, of course are trying to get the best of both worlds w/ speed and accuracy. Seems like a laudible goal.Since I don't even own poser, atm (I use D|S, and very little), I wish I could contribute more. I think it is a valid excercise.I think the proper use of maps is very important and part of skill development in texturing. It is an area that should be covered more for carrara. On the note about sss in carrara I will say that I have been able to define sss settings independantly on seperate shaders in seperate domains.This doesn't give as much control,I don't think as control maps, but if you tweak each shader individually with the above mentioned maps in the different channels seems like you could get enough variation. Now how accurate it would be I don't know. If you are using a layers lists as many often do w/ poser figures, I donot believe you could do this. The key is seperate shaders for body parts defined in their own domains.I will say that hair coming into carrara doesn't look so great, I think an anisotropic lighting model might help also. I have seen that there is amazing options and work arounds for things tho...just have to figure them out. As far as I can tell tho, carrara channels are setup very well in comparison to some highend products, it's just you don't see, as skilled a user often, taking advantage of these channels.(Altho there is some superb carrara work at cgtalk.com, by some real pros)

No need to think outside the box....
    Just make it invisible.