I have a problem with the shadows in this picture, as you can see the sun makes a nice shadow in the grass, but not on her arm. Wen I make a large ground plane, the shadow on that dissapears too. Can anyone help me with this issue? b.t.w.: the render was done with a stripped down version of the lightsets that are going to be in the marketplace, you can get it here:

http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.ez?Who=Shademaster

thank you in advance.

I'm not sure what shadow you feel is missing? from the bird? Coz I think that's the one on her belly. Apart from that, it's a nice picture :o) Is the grass possibly P5 hair?

The grass is done in cinema with a free plugin called hairdepartment, what I see is wrong about the shading is that the left shoulder is receiving shadows, but the left part of her breast isn't....hmmm.....I'll have to rethink some things I guess. Thanks anyway :).

I did some tests on this a while back targeting the glowing nostrils problems. This I think is a similar issue. I'll try to locate the images I created for that test but here is what I found. Loading vicky in and zooming in on her face and rendering with one light with all rotations on it set to zero with the excpetion of moving it to our right by 40 degrees. With full vicky the nostrils glowed and the nose did not cast a shadow on the face. A ball placed on the tip of the nose did cast a shadow so I though maybe a mesh wouldn't cast a shadow on the same group it was in. This I found to be wrong in the next two tests. I used the grouping tool to spawn props and deleted the original vicky. Same problems with shadows and the ball still casted a shadow on her cheec with no coresponding shadow for the nose. Removed all props but the ones for her head and the ball at the tip of her nose. This left me with just her eyes and her head loaded, a real low poly count left. The shadows now showed up! The nostrils no longer glowed and the cheeck received the shadows from the nose, at this point I removed the ball and it actually looked excelent. So this lead me to think that it might have been a ploy count issue but then I got to thinking. Poser shades using two different methods. Depth shading: This is where poser calculates simulated shadows depending on the depth of a vertex in the mesh itself, this assumes lighting is coming from the camera. Shadow mapping: This is where you can increase the resolution of the shadow map for each light. Now if your mesh is small and compact with just one single UVMapping texture then this gets cheap. Think of it this way, for every texture you have loaded, poser creates a copy and paints it's shadows on it, the higher resolution in your shadow setting uses a higher resolution shadow map. THis map gets spread out for all of your items. How does this translate? FOr large items, the shadow map can't get big enough to adequetly paint shadows that will show up. For lots of items, the shadow map gets split between all the different items and once again the resolution becomes far to small to actually see the shadows show up. This problem is inherent to Poser 4's rendering engine with no way to truely correct it. Someone else took the same tests to Poser 5 to see if the problem was fixed, and under certian settings it was. You have to have raytraced shadows on I know, but unsure of the other settings. Hope that helps exaplin it.

Thank you very much Kattman! This really helped me out! I was thinking that it had something to do with the shadowmap resolution, but always thought that if I would increase the shadowmap sized the problem would be gone. So the next challenge is to get it to work in Poser 5 then with raytracing on (will probably take 32 hours to render then). thanks a lot!

You could also try using the shadow cam lites and zooming in to make sure the shadow maps are being utilised to their full potential. That can save having to use larger shadow map values. (I also checked the nudity flag for you)

I don't believe the shadow map functionality is actually implemented by 'painting' the textures or objects, but instead is effectively a camera 'depth map' with some added layering for transparencies. When a pixel is to be drawn by Firefly or the P4 renderer, the distance and direction between the pixel and each shadowed light source is calculated and the pixel is either illuminated or shadowed depending on the (distance) value of the corresponding 'z-buffer' entry in the shadow map. For infinite lights, the area that the shadow map covers is scaled to include all (shadow receiveing) objects in the scene. In practical terms, this means that if you have a very big object (typically a ground plane) or several objects dispersed across a wide area, the shadow map will also cover this wide area, and hence each pixel in the shadow map, at any given resolution, will also cover a large area of the scene. Hence you can suffer a severe loss of shadow resolution, or even lose entire object shadows, simply because they occupy less than a pixel's resolution when projected onto the shadow map. The only practical solutions are to reduce the size of the ground plane, increase the resolution of the shadowmap or resort to spotlights and try to blend them with the a 'global' infinite light. For a more impractical solution (never tested this in P5) there was a third, undocumented, type of light in Poser 4 designated a 'local light' which was only accessible through ProPack Python, or editing the pz3 file (light type 2, I believe) which acted like a shadow casting spotlight within the limits of its falloff angles, and acted like a non-shadow casting infinite light, with the same pointing angle, outside the angular limits. This could allow shadows to be focused on single objects in the centre on the scene, but still provide a global light source without blending artifacts for the background. Bill

While there's a lot of good information above, am I the only person who thinks that the shadows in this image actually look pretty good? The figure's right breast shouldn't be showing a bit more shadow than it is, and the left breast's dark penumbra is exactly where it should be. Yes, south of that line the breast is showing some reflected or ambient light instead of the dark shadow you see on the arm, but it's not nearly in the same plane as that arm, and this kicked-back light (slightly green, as if reflected from the grass) looks like something you might well see out-of-doors.

I'm persuaded it might be a little darker if not for the shortcomings of shadow-mapping. But IMHO it looks great just the way it is.

Another Bill

Tested it with a new method, rendering the image bit by bit (6 pieces in total) so all the shadowmaps could be sufficiently spread. Rendering this way goes a lot faster because after you rendered the grass, you can just remove it so rendering the other pieces goes a lot quicker cause all the shadowmaps for the grass don't have to be recalculated. The shadows of the head and shoulders are appearing now. See the difference...

D*amnit, the hair is floating! Imperfections that don't show when you render without shadows...lol