jenay. >When I render a scene with a huge distant background plane (to avoid casting shadows onto the plane itself) I realize that all shadows are nearly invisible. when I render the same scene without background plane, shadows are OK. This is what I was mentioning earlier. When Poser calculates it's shadows it basically "looks through" the shadow light camera. The Shadow cameras are set up to automatically adjust to the size of the scene. that is to say if you put something far away it will zoom out to see everything. at some point the camera will zoom so far back that your foreground items become a speck or not visible at all. So no shadowing is cast. You can avoid this by setting up your scene then switching your view to the shadow cam and adjusting the camera to point at your foreground items. Or you can switch to raytrace shadows. To keep things from casting shadows on your background image without putting it so far away you can (assuming your using p5 or 6) connect your image map to the ambient color and set ambient to 1 and diffuse and to 0 (but leave the image connected to the diffuse color)

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