I just bought Poser 5 and am beginning to try and learn it. One very irritating thing I have noticed in my renderings is that, when the mouth of the model is open, the light inside is unnaturally bright. It really destroys the realism. All of the lights are set to cast shadows. What am I doing wrong?

If you're using the P4 renderer you'll find this problem is insurmountable. Nostrils also display the same characteristic. Using Firefly and playing around with the shadow bias will cure it. I can't remember the specific setting for shadow bias, unfortunately.

Thanks. I am using the Firefly renderer. I will take your advice and experiment with the shadow settings to see if that helps.

You could try making the textures inside the mouth darker.

Someone (Duane Moody maybe?) made a morph that fixed the nostril problems in the basic P4s and the first generation Mike and Vicky. It might still be in freestuff.

The cast shadows check box is not only on the light properties, but also on the body part properties, like the head, and on the render settings. The draft firefly mode's render settings do not have cast shadows checked by default to save time. Try checking cast shadows in Render/Render Options.../Render Settings to turn off the light in the mouth. Jeff

Thanks Jeff01 - that was the answer I was looking for. Since I am new to this application, I had not noticed the shadow casting option inthe render settings. Worked like a charm!

slent - if you have a problem with the nostrils, Runtimedna.com has a no-glow nostril prop in the freebies section that's just great. :) RC

Why do I find the concept of glowing nostrils and mouths funny?

This is a pet peeve of mine, too. FYI... professional FX houses use a technique involving a special secondary render pass that uses "one-bounce to camera only" ray tracing count called an Occlusion Pass (usually w/ Renderman or Mental Ray) to determine if areas of a surface are concave (like mouths, nostrils, armpits, and other body skin-fold crevices) and use this extra render pass in a clever composite to darken those areas, since they would by nature recieve less light than their surrounding regions. I've tried with no success to duplicate this occlusion pass effect with firefly. Since others have dealt fairly well with the nostrils already (look in freestuff) I've been toying (slowly and intermittently) with the workaround idea of creating a "dark translucent morphing mouth ball prop" that will partially fill the open mouth and darken it appropriately -- it's a little tricky, but if I meet with any success I will share it with the community. Anyone else's input and sharing would be great, please let me know!!

By the way... I agree with Jeff's shadow's check box concept above as well... it just isn't 100% effective for all my renders, and I was hoping to push the envelope for even more lighting realism and control.

unless you shine a light up someones nose or in their mouth, it usually looks dark, so darkening the textures works as well, but it doesn`t slow the rendering down any.

Darkening mouth textures is defintely another tool, which I use also, especially if the figure is distant from the camera and closeup mouth details are indistinct. (I didn't mean to overlook your good suggestion earlier.) The trouble with just darkening the textures though, is that unless you remap the mouth, teeth and tongue in variable sections, you have to darken them uniformly; When you're going for true photoreal shadowing in a closeup image, the front facing teeth, the front of the tongue, and sometimes even the front-facing back wall of the throat need to be brighter, with a gradient intensity falloff to the innermost non-facing concave portions of the inner mouth -- and this becomes even more tricky when the light is coming from side, high, or low angles relative to the head position. That's why I thought using some kind of a semi-translucent, layered, and positionable "darkmouth blob" object might be the thing to do, if I can figure out a useable implementation of it. Obviously, all of this is getting very picky for shadow realism -- but that's the kind of stuff the professional occlusion passes achieve, and I'm just trying to figure out how to match that level of quality. When you see a CG creature with and without occlusion darkening, you'd be amazed at the comparative extra level of realism you get from a relatively subtle change like this.