I have some objects that refuse to render as anything but solid black in Poser 5 using either the Firefly renderer or the Poser 4 renderer. Both of these objects look fine when viewed as texture-shaded in the Document Window, although I had to change the ambient color to gray on one of them to see any of the texture. Has anyone else experienced this? Is there an easy fix? Gromit

Try reversing the normals, if they are objects you've imported.

One of them is the sky dome in HMann's 3d Worlds. It looks fine until you render, then there's nothing there but black. It is a prop, but I didn't import it. Same thing with the other objects, they are all part of a castle construction set, pieces of wall and gates. Gromit

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/firefaq.html#8

Well, so far no luck. I tried the alternate diffuse color thing and also the displacement fix, but I still get the same results. I'll keep playing around with this but if anyone has an idea what to do I'd appreciate it. Gromit

Here's a screen cap of my material settings for the sky dome. See if yours are the same.

I've noticed that sometimes, P5 screws up the material settings on items that were designed for P4. I think it has something to do with the way P4 uses 100 to mean P5's 1.

For the skydome, make sure that "casts shadows" property is turned off for the prop, otherwise infinite lights will not get through to the scene if create shadows. Also with P5, plug the sky texture into the ambient channel, set the ambient value to 1.0 and set the diffuse colour to black. Bill