I'd found a free steel 'milk-churn' or flask on Render Hub by Takoyto.
https://www.renderhub.com/takoyto/flask-low-poly-3d-model

The FBX imported knee-high at 100% original scale. The OBJ imported knee-high at ~1% original scale. Both may need 'Drop to Floor'. Both had ~2600 polys plus 4k 'gls', 'nrml' and 'rfl' textures. I reckoned these would load into Poser as Diffuse, Bump and Highlight, with 'Reflection' set as 'RayTrace'. They did, but the surface looked dull, sorta-anodised.

Half-remembering my battle with that stubborn 'not-a-mirror', I hunted around in 'Advanced Materials', used the arcane invocation required to spawn genuine metallicity. So, right-click anywhere in tessellated grey area beside 'Poser Surface' and other boxes, select 'New Node', 'Root', 'Physical Surface' and another box appears. Part-way down, there's a 'Metallic' field. IMHO, '1' is pure mirror, '0.5' is working'Stainless Steel'. Rendered as such.

Note: I'm still fumbling my way, do not know how much of this is 'luck' or is 'right'...


Okay, the material side was solved to 'okay', but the flask lid and latch were not 'articulated'. They were fixed open.

I hauled the OBJ into my ($$) TurboCAD 2016. The mesh was a single model. I tried 'exploding' it once. Now, it was split to parts: tank, handles, lid, hinge, hasp etc. I shuffled these to new 'layers', so they'd appear as separate groups in Poser. After saving the entire model as a new OBJ, I also saved out the base tank, the lid + hinge-arm and the hasp loop as separate OBJs.

The 'split to parts' OBJ loaded at same ~1% original scale, as did the bare 'base', its lid + hinge-arm and the hasp loop. As these were independent objects, I was able to turn on their 'show origin' option, change their origins to their 'real' hinge-line. Then, they could be pivoted to close and latch. And, yes, parented to 'Base' so moved around scene as a set.l..

A couple of trial renders later, I'd dialled up the lighting enough to look good. 'Box' was merrily rendering a very shiny 'FBX' version, so I set Superfly, Progressive, 64 Pixel Samples, both GTX GPU cards and their preferred 1024 Vol-Bounces and Buckets. CPU-only renders on PC or 'Box' prefer 64 VB+B, remember to switch...

I've not yet figured how to reliably save 'origin edited' models such I can export them as eg PP2, so saved entire scene as PZ3.

One of these had 128 pixel samples, ran in 'several' hours on 'Box'. The other had 512 pixel samples, took 13 hours...

Can you tell them apart ?

That looks excellent, that's not something you see everyday. Thank you very much for the info Nik