thank you ockham! great help :)

drifterlee, could it be some weird camera setting like hither/thither or shadowcam coverage? I have had my cameras go totally wonky and had to delete the .pz3 and start over from scratch, reason can be hitting the face camera when no figure is in the scene or some other bug inducing behavior such as something with the orthognal cameras that trashes all the lights and cameras in the .pz3 so they act unpredictably.