My Poser 5 FireFly Renderer is randomly failing to render shadows in scenes. It'll render with shadows then without shadows on back to back renders of the same scene. I've even loaded P5 on other PCs and got the same results.

After around 10-12 clean installs and complete uninstalls, reading the manual till my eyes hurt, and trying bothe the SP3 and the current SP4 I give up. The shadows still keep randomly failing. Does any one have any ideas or input on what's going on here?

Current computer #1 is a Epox With a AMD Thunderbird 1.2 Gig CPU. and 768 pc133 RAM.

Current computer #2 is a ECS with a AMD XP 2000 CPU and 512mb PC333 Ram.

Other PCs I've tried included Epox, Abit, Intel mobos using AMD and P4 CPUs. Two had 512mb and one had 768mb of RAM. All the PCs demonstrated the same totaly random failure to render shadows with the Poser 5 SP3 and SP4.

No idea, but try rendering to a new window instead of main window. Could be a glitch about updating the view. In the new window (set to match the main or to a larger size) there is no problem of updating.

Another thing: when the rendering starts you should see in the render control window the progress of 'rendering shadow map' for as many times as many lights with 'depth map shadow' option you have. If that's not happening, and the rendering starts immediately (almost) then you can cancel the rendering and try again.

Sorry, maybe a dumb reply, but worth a try...
Oh and set the minimum displacement bounds to something like 0.5 (0 could give some problems i assume) or uncheck it if you are not using displacement maps in the materials. Message edited on: 09/07/2004 18:31

Occasionally I have the same problem.
I solve it by deleting the offending light and creating a new light with the same settings.
Shadows will now reappear

This has always worked for me

There is a known issue with rendering to the main window. Whenever possible, render to a new window.

I thought also the shadowmaps should be [dunno what that kind of numbers are called] but like 256 - 512 - 1024, perhaps that "800" is what sets it off? Never seen this happen myself and I rarely render to a new window. But then I mostly use raytraced shadows too. But as far as I've heard it's the shadowcams that "dissapear". Deleting the light and putting a new one in instead should fix it.

I had something similar happen only recently. I had the Parameters Properties Box open, and was selecting each light in turn in order to turn shadows on. However, the strange thing I found was that if reselected a light, the shadow which I'd just turned on was no longer enabled. Incidentally it wasn't the process of re-selection per se which created a problem. The scene would render without shadows (or at best with shadow from one light only) when I encountered this anomaly.

I had a similar problem, even when rendering to a new window, at times. When it's rendered to the main window, the first thing I was told by a friend was to select the ground plane, and turn off "casts shadows." No idea why, but it seems to work about 80% of the time. The displacement bounds comment above worked the other 20% of the time. Now I always render to a new window, regardless.

Thanks for all this help. I've tried deleting and replacing the lights, rendered to a new window, and I've played with the shadowmap setting. I haven't tried turning off the "casts shadow" on the ground plane yet though. Here's something else I just found. When the shadow is working putting a character in the scene killed the shadows again and changing the lights didn't bring back the shadows. This one is realy strange.

Remember that shadowmaps are calculated from the WHOLE scene. So if you have some huge prop, you will need a much bigger shadow map too. That could explain why the shadows dissapear when you add a character...

Ohhhh now that is very interesting. I haven't set shasowmaps over 1500. I didn't know it claculated from the whole scene. I'll try that. Maybe that'll help. ernyoka it seems you realy know the FireFly well. Thanks.