How on earch do you make poser 5 display the lighting in the redering as the same thats in the model display? I had a very nice sean set up, nice, bright, clear, you could see everything, the lighting was fine.. then I went to reder it.. three hours of rendering.. but the renderd image is almost soled black! It';s so dark that you can't even put it into photoshop/psp to brighten it, cause most of it is a soled black blotch! Only a few areas are lit, and they are also very dark. How on earth do you get the lighting to display the same way you got it set up? I don't get whats going on.. the last image I renderd came out the same way I had the lighting set up.. now this ones almost totly black? what gives?

Without any details about your scene, there's really no way to tell, but one thing that might be a problem is if you have a lot of elements in the scene, some might be blocking the lights. Since there is no realtime shadow display, the scene will look fine in preview, but when rendered will become very dark because everything is in shadow. Also, shader nodes don't display in the scene preview, which could be another factor, but probably not in this case.

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the display will never look like a rendered image. To get an understanding of lighting behavior, I refer you to Dr. Geep's great tutorial on spotlights.

Darn it >.< my biggist prob is useing a sky dome. any lighht I stick in it will make the sky done be bright white and lose what ever image is used on it.. guess I have to forget about the sky done else I'll never be able to get the light just where I want it to be >.< ..man it be so much easier if the lighting woul;d just render looking the same as it dose on display.. I hate wasting hours for it to render just to find it's not even close to what I wanted..

I know Bryce has controls over lighting, such as intensity, color, range, etc..I would think Poser might have the same. I often turn down lights if things get washed out..unless that's the effect I'm going for..;)

Just a suggestion: before starting the 'final' render with all the renderer parameters pumped up, make a pre-render with very basic settings (displacement mapping, raytracing, shadows and polygon smoothing off, maximum texture resolution = 512, pixel samples 1, postwork filter size 1, no 3d motion blur, no depth of field). Also you want to render to an external window of half the size (or even less) of the final render, like a 640 x 480 for instance. That way your render would take a lot less time, and you'll have the possibility of tweaking those lights again well before 3 hours from your start... Hope this tip helps...

...my biggist prob is useing a sky dome. any lighht I stick in it will make the sky done be bright white and lose what ever image is used on it.. I've had that problem with backgrounds on a square before. What sometimes works is rather than using a lot of lights, I've upped the ambient setting on the texture. In this case, the texture you're using on the skydome.

I don't know what to do. I've followed the tutorials.. I've done everything I could think of.. yet it's STILL rendering super dark! This one in the file just ugh.. I removed the sky dome, removed all the extra stuff, I set all the lighting, spotlights and such all up.. it looks totly fine in the display.. but renderd.. UGH! it's so stinking dark!! I've moved the lights, edited the spotlights. and NOTHING I do will make it any brighter! This is as bright as I've been able to get it. Else it's nearly a soled black. I got no clue what I'm doing wrong.. all the spotlights and such are set just how them tutorials are said to make what I want lit up.. but yet.. all I get is this dark ugly junk..

Your composition is good, btw. Lighting in Poser 5 DOES NOT operate in the same way that real world lighting does. The closest comparison -- and one that is somewhat lacking even then -- is Film lighting, or stage lighting. Could you do a combined image made up of screen grabs of the following areas: your lighting ball (the little picture where your light controls are), and the light parameter dials for each of your lights and then the properties for each one. (alternatively, you could save your lightset as an lt2 and make it available). With that information, we could likely help find out what the problem is faster.

Look at the upper surface, the one simulating sea level. Does that have the 'cast shadows' checked? If so that could be the cause, filtering off all the lights that are situated higher than that. Turn off the cast shadows on that and try again... (Just a thought)

All you need to do is turn OFF shadowcasting on the dome object (or any other surface between your scene and the lights) OR turn off shadowcasting on the light itself.

I had a very nice sean set up There's a nice Sean? Okay, seriously, the problem seems to be that you have no bottom lighting. You want the water plane to act like a RW one that reflects and throws off ambient light, and Poser stuff, whether 4 or 5, doesnt do that. So cheat. Put a couple of dim spotlights under the figures: place them on the camera side, facing up at about a 45 degree angle. You'll have to play with them a bit to find the right intensity, but that will give you the suggestion of bounce light you're looking for.