Every single time I have tried  I end up with something along the lines of this!  I want a transparent .png file with just the shadow, but no matter what I do I end up with the shadow over top of white!!!

I save all of my images at .png files and when I open them in Paint Shop Pro there is no background, just the rendered image. Yet I can't seem to do that with just the shadows.

I have floor set to show and to cast shadows.

I know this isn't about V4, but can someone please  answer it anyway? :)

Nor is it about hanging Christmas lights, which my wife just got done making me do.

I can't see a way around it... it looks to me like the code that renders in the non-shadow part is different from the code that subtracts the background pixels from the pixels representing objects. So, the rendering program paints both background pixels and object pixels white, but it's still only the background pixels that become transparent on export.

I think the only option you would have would be to import the image in to PSP, and remove the all white pixels with the selection tool. 

Sorry I couldn't be more help.

Thanks :) But I've seen people talking about rendering shadows separately and overlaying them on the image when done. So it must be possible. I just don't know what I'm doing that is wrong.

It seems strange that Poser would give the ability of being able to render just shadows and have it be totally useless by having them  appear on a white background. What is the point of rendering shadows by themselves if that is the case?

I don't know... it may be one of those features that someone thought was a good idea, but never really implemented fully. You know how us programmers can be, sometimes.

Whenever I've dealt with manipulating the shadows separately, I've always just removed the white manually or by using a mask layer, so I don't know what elese there might be to try. Outside of Poser, I know that POV has a rendering option like that, where it will make the object invisible and just show it's shadow, but there has to be a visible object to receive the shadow. The shadow and partial shadow edges receive their color (even if it's white) from the object the shadow is on, so that object, at least, has to be in the image.

First, save your shadow render as tif. That way you'll get nothing but your shadows over pure white. Then copy the the shadow, paste it as a new layer over your normal render and set the shadow layer's blend mode to multiply. You can then tinker with the shadow layer's transparency to adjust the shadow strength.

Your normal render is the background layer, the shadow is the raster layer.