Is there a way to make the Ground transparent when rendering over a background. I am trying to cast shodows of my figure in order to make him look as though he is in a "Scene" when it's really only a background created in RDS. Any suggestions? Thanks for the help... P.S. BTW, Love the Poser Forum. I had Poser 2 forever and now just got Poser 4. Thanks for all the help! Chuck

One thing would be to put down a semi transparent floor with a solid color. The shadow will show on this, at least partially.

As you may have gathered -- not really. Other than Mason's suggestion, another approach is to render the figure over a highly saturated color background, then, in post production, do a "chromakey" type effect, masking out the colored background and keeping the figure and shadow.

Chuck the ground can be made transparent by adjusting the transparancy settings in the material properties window. It may or may not achieve what you are trying to do as the shadow will also be made transparent. There are several tricks you can try. If you can closely match the ground texture to the background texture, you may be able to crank up the intensity of the shadow to get a very strong dark black shadow, and then make the ground simi-transparent - say around 50% to 75%. This will help blend the ground texture with the background texture and soften the harsh shadow. The right lighting and getting a close match on the two textures will be the big trick here. The other thing you can do, which I do a lot, is use two square props, one for the background and the other for the ground, turning off the ground plane and cast shadows in the object properties for both props. This way you can use the same or compatable texture(s)on both, and can align the squares so that the background square covers up what you don't want showing on the ground square. You will still have to play with your lighting, and may have to turn cast shadows off for some of the lights, (object properties menu) but the two props are easier to work with, and you can parent them, and figure, to the ground prop( even though it is not visible) and rotate it to move everything. This makes adjusting your lighting easier than having move each light seperately to try out different angles. Hope this helps. Oh, one more thing. Before parenting anything in Poser 4 always save a backup copy of the file first as parenting some things together sometimes creates strange results and it is often impossible to undo. Rob

What I do, and it's not perfectly accurate, is: when you bring in your background, paste the figure to the background. All you get is the little shadow that the working window uses to anchor the figure to the ground just for reference, but it helps ground your character in the scene. At least he/she doesn't appear to be floating. Melanie

I can't even get the ground to show in my renders. No matter what I do with textures and bumps applied to the ground plane I get nada but default grey when I render.... Any ideas out there?

You have to go in and turn on the ground plane feature. It's in the Display menu, go down to Guides and click on Ground Plane to turn it on. Hope that helps. Melanie