I've been reading with interest the other threads on this subject. I have a scene with a single shadow spotlight representing the sun and some other lights for ambient and fill that don't cast shadows. While I can get the "sun" to cast ray-traced shadows, I cannot get it to cast any shadow at all using depth-mapping. I've already used the shadowcam to tighten up the area so I'm not rendering shadows outside of the view I'm trying to render, and I've increased the shadow map size to 1024, which is bigger than my 640x480 render. "Shadow" parameter is set to 1. In desperation, I copied the entire lighting setup to a basic scene with only a pair of Don and Judy characters positioned so Judy would cast a shadow on Don. I deleted all the other lights except for the shadow spot light. No shadows. I tightened up the shadowcam for that light, still nothing. I switched to ray-traced shadows and there they are, sharp and black. It's like "Cast Shadows" is turned off for everything in the scene when I try to use depth-mapped shadows. Any ideas?

You did install the latest Service Release? I do remember that there was a problem with missing depth map shadows in an earlier release.

Yes, I believe so. Version number is 5.0.4.321. I have found that the problem seems to be in the light set I am using. I created that set in another scene, saved it and then used it in the current scene which is where I'm having the problem. If I use that light set in my test scene with Don and Judy only, I also see the problem of no shadows. If I open a new scene and create the shadow light from scratch, the shadows look ok. However, it doesn't work to just delete the lights and recreate them. Whatever the problem is, it just keeps coming back when you do that. It must be some parameter in the light set definition that persists even after all the lights are deleted.

Hmmm... have you tried looking through the shadow cam? I had this problem once and I'm sure it was related to shadow cams...

Sounds like you've covered the ususal bases... haven't got a clue, -- assuming they are in fact Spotlights, and not them-thar evil, sneaky, behind your back, shadowcam-auto-readjusting Omni lights.

Skipping right over all of the DOOH! basics, (like is the Light actually on & is the Light's Shadow (opacity) dial and map size set above 0.0, etc.), so, if no one ID's the problem, you might post a screen grab of the light's dials, the view from the shadowcam AFTER the render, and the render.

Actually this gets more and more mysterious. I finally called Curious Labs Technical Support about this because I have a scene I spent quite a bit of time on and don't want to have to redo. As I mentioned in my previous post above, whatever the problem is, it propagates through the light set I created, so any PZ3 I insert that into has the same characteristics - no depth-mapped shadows. If I delete the lights, either by clicking them one-by-one or using a Python script I have, and then create a new light, it also won't cast depth-mapped shadows. Now here's where it really gets even stranger: If I save the figures from that scene, exit Poser completely, start it again with an empty scene and insert the figures I saved, the problem is back. No shadows. I went so far as to run a comparison between the CR2s of one of the figures I saved - a Don with hair - with its original CR2 using MS Word's Merge and Compare feature (a 7,000 page document gasp). I can't see what's causing this unless it has to do with the internal figure number itself, which gets changed to 10. The rest of the differences look to be all shader nodes and such, although there is an "auto-fit" block of data that is repeated several times. I'm not sure what that is. I'm going to send copies of the test PZ3 and LT2 to the technical support people today and let them have a look. I know, it's probably something really dumb that I did myself but thus far I haven't been able to track it down.

I have run into similar problems, with it flat out refusing to render shadowmapped shadows. In one instance, repeating an animation a second time produced shadows (no other changes). I just checked and the did an update to, I think 5.0.4.325. Maybe that will fix the issues... Reading another thread (other firefly problems), svdl suggested deleting all tmp files before doing a problem render (when all else fails, reboot the computer as well). It is worth a try...

Looks like the problem is solved. It turned out that the common link I missed in all of the instances was the creation of new lights. Any new light I created was not able to cast depth-mapped shadows. And that, it turns out, goes back to a problem in one of the earlier service packs. I thought mine were up-to-date but found out that I was one behind, all because of a disk crash I had a few months back and subsequent rebuild. I failed to pick up the newest service pack when I reinstalled Poser. So the solution was to install the latest service pack, delete all lights in the scene and re-create them.