Maybe dumb question - but is it possible to render directly in black and white. How?

Not with normal renders. The sketch designer will give you black and white output, but it also modifies the look of the image. If you have a paint program like Photoshop, PSP, or the Gimp, it's a fairly simple matter to convert the images to black and white.

You could go into the shaders for every material in your image and change the colors to gray scale, or gray scale all of your image maps, too.

Thanks - I thought as much but wondered if I'd missed something in Poser. Thanks for theip on gimp. 

er, you can always allocate black and white materials ( or shades of grey)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2539548

It doesn't seem very possible.  I asked that question months ago. Anyway here is the thread and the comments to my question.

If you're doing a toon type render, you can do various gray tones with that route

Example of gray tone toon render (done with modified elements from the Sixus Toon shader pack)

Best bet though otherwise is take the textures in and desaturate/remove all color in Photoshop (or whatever you have). I did this for a partial effect on a two part render I did...I wanted a bright colorful scene, but one character needed to be the odd person out. So I just converted all the textures to gray scale, futzed with the levels to help control how light or dark it was and then rendered away.

And that image is here

Not only possible, but with P6 it's quite simple..... No post work. Just a matter of adding a single math_functions node set to "add". Nothing else was changed from the default "Jessi" material settings. (Don't forget to click the pic for full size so you can see the settings.)

Interesting. I've always used the HSV node with Saturation set to 0. I'll try using the Add next time. It looks like it requires even less settings :o)

Oops....I lied.....
I did change one other setting.
I added a dark green color to the ambient channel on her irises set to about .5.....

I came to this stuff with a background in photography, and getting a greyscale "right" can be tricky. Photographs were routinely adjusted, to correct for the differences between the eye and film, and to show colour differences that were lost. All this is for black-and-white film: The film is more sensitive to blue light, and older films didn't respond to red light (which meant makeup for cinema actors was a bit odd-looking). Photographers routinely used a yellow filter: yellow because it blocks blue light. And green trees reflect red and infra-red light. If you want something that looks right for an old photo, up to about the 1920w, split the render into channels and just use the blue. Unfortunately, filters rarely match the RGB split of a CGI image, or what a digital camera records. Yoo may need to reduce the blue brightness a bit and include a little of the green channel. By the 1940s, film could respond to red light, but you still have the excess blue-sensitivity. If you're using a Clouds shader for your sky, you might do better to use grey instead of blue for the base colour, which would give the chief effect of the yellow filter. Without it, clouds tended to vanish. Incidentally, modern chromogenic films use the dye immages of colour film, but still try to match the behaviour of traditional black and white. It's what photographers expect. There are other differences besides the colour response.

Thanks for those tips, AntoniaTiger :o) I'll definately keep them in mind. I like making B/W pictures out of my renders. Mosttimes it makes them look more real. So far I've just fiddled around with the filters in Photoshop until I got the result I wanted but at least now I'll know what to actually look for :D

An example: