i've just started using P6 but when i do a render with the shadow maps turned on with a light, it doesn't recognise the transparency areas in hair and i get big lumps of shadow instead of fine strands. i've tried different lights but still the same thing happens when the shadows are on. i know it's probably something simple but i can't be bothered reading the manual and i don't really have any idea what i'm doing in P6 yet! i used the P4 renderer too if that makes any difference. Thanks.

post a screencap using the shadowcam for the lite involved.

Attached Link: http://www.physicalc-software.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20

Thanks for the link, i checked and the bias was 0.8 so i reduced that right down to 0.01 and the shadow map size was 4000 so that should have got rid of the nasty lumpy shadows but it's still the same and there's no other light with shadows on in the image so what else could it be? Thanks.

The Poser 4 renderer doesn't properly render shadows through transparency. I would strongly suggest switching to Firefly if you want to get the best render quality Poser 6 is capable of (quite good, once you get the hang of it). If you want some suggestions:

Never set the shadowmap size to more than twice your actual image/render size. All this does is make the render take longer, with no benefit in shadow quality. I generally use 3-5 lights, with one (the brightest) either set to cast raytraced shadows, or else 1024 shadowmaps. The remaining (dimmer) lights are set to 128 or 256. All lights have their min shadow bias set to 0.2

I use the following settings for Firefly (any options not mentioned below are disabled):
[Quality]
Manual Settings
Cast shadows
Raytracing

Raytrace bounces: 2
Min shading rate: 0.5 (sometimes 0.2)
Pixel samples: 2 (sometimes 4)
Max texture size: 1024 (rarely 2048)
Max bucket size: 64 (sometimes 128)
Min displacement bounds: 2.0

[Options]
Smooth polygons
Use displacement maps
Post filter size: 1
Post filter type: box

Note that you will need to manually disable polygon smoothing (in the properties of the prop itself) for any props that become incorrectly rounded in renders.

i wish i could go back to P4, i hate P6, nothing works properly! :crying: The only time i tried a firefly render, it took 26 hours and she had red skin so i'm not impressed with that! Ok, i render huge (2700 x 3000 @ 300 dpi) but life is just too short to wait that long for a render! i think i will just stop using shadow maps. Thanks.

9x10" is not "huge." You have a problem that can probably be fixed, if that takes 26 hours. Dig through the site for forum discussions of render times. Unless you are using huge numbers of highly image textures figures or have a very old (i.e., more than five years) computer, you should not be seeing such slow renders.

M

Speaking of useful threads on this subject, just look below a bit for Unzipped's "My brief render settings experiment results."

M

So basically it's impossible to get accurate shadow maps with the Poser 4 renderer? i will have to use Firefly if i want decent shadows? Thanks.