I had just finished making a simple door figure out of one Poser square and some Poser boxes and things. I did a render and noticed that the sections of the door made out of the square do not cast shadows. I loaded a new square and a box into the doc window, and sure enough the box cast a shadow, but the square (double sided) did not. Two questions: "Casts Shadows" is enabled in Properties box, so Why does the square not cast a shadow??? All the Poser props seem to cast shadows except for the suqare and the one sided square (or is it just on my system?). The other question is; is there any way I can make my door figure cast shadows for all its parts, or do I have to rip it apart and replace the square with a box?

Sorry, but I just tried both squares, a high res square, and the box, and they all cast shadows from either direction. Anything funny in the pp2? Mark

I should have mentioned I am using Poser 4.0.3.126., on a PC. I can't see anything strange in the pp2, there is no "castsShadow" line in the pp2, but then neither is there one in the box.pp2, and that does cast shadows. I tried putting a "castsShadow 1" line in the pp2, but that did not help. Cast Shadows is on for the Render Options, and for all three lights. "castShadows 1" is set in the "renderDefaults" section of the "preferedState.pz3". I can't think of anything else to try.

Yeah, I'm on P5, and my version of P4 is PP equipped. Very strange. Mark

I've witnessed some strange shadow effects on the ground plane with Poser 4's renderer. If you replace the ground plane with another square prop, are the shadows still absent?

Little_Dragon, you werw right! I don't understand this, it seems like black magic. The top 4 images were made using a smallish Poser square over the ground plain, the results were as expected. When the square was scaleed up, and only partially covering the ground plane I saw some very strange results, images 6 to 8.

heyas.... erm... hmm. what size shadow map are you using? does changing the size of that do anything different? i dunno, maybe the map is too small to hit the squares or... yeah, okay, that sounds dumb, but hey... this is POSER we're talking about! :)

Demons,I knew it! Time for an exorcist.

I have never had good luck using the poser ground in any version of poser. I have always needed to create ground or floor. I have used the squares, but more often, a very thin cube. The squares (mostly the one sided one) sometimes aren't visible while posing... so, the thin cube seemed to work better for me. (I agree with anyone who says we shouldn't need to resort to these silly tricks and techniques. Hehe). Good luck, Ericroy

Bloodsong, bumping the shadow map up to 1024 does not help neither does changing the shadow strength. This is no longer a big problem as I can use a floor obnject as per Little Dragon's sugestion, but now I have a new problem, see my next post.

More shadow problems. The walls are separate single sided objects. The scene is lit by 3 infinite lights. Even if the walls are overlaped there is a rim of light at their edges, !@#$%.

hmmm.... makes me glad i never do architectural stuff! :)

Looks like you could use some spackle.

I was wondering...could you use a box instead of individual walls? Ya know like flip the normals, remap it, and texture the inside. What if you welded the walls together? Anyone try anything like this?

Iamonk, I have done what you sugest in the past, but now I want to make a modeular entity. Perhaps I have to work round these problems, but I would rather solve them!