I have modeled a simple box with a lid in C4D, exported it as *.obj and in Poser set it up as a rigged character and saved it to the Library. Everything works fine fine except for one thing: if I render with FireFly and have Cast Shadows activated the object renders jet black with very black and jagged ground shadows. Disable Cast Shadows in FireFly or render using the Poser 4 engine it renders as expected.

Here are a couple of odd things I've noticed in my attempts to solve this:

1. If I add another character or even a basic prop like a ball, move it out of the way (still keeping it in the scene) and hit render everything looks as it should even with FireFly and Cast Shadows. If I scale the ball down to 1% it's original size and renders, everything looks peachy. If I delete the ball the object goes black again. It's like Poser needs that extra object to get the scaling of the shadows right but that's only a guess, I have really no idea what's going on here.

2. If I import the the original obj-file of the object and render with FireFly and Cast Shadows it renders perfectly. Something apparently happens when I turn the object into a character/figure and adds it to Poser's library.

All ideas are highly appreciated!

/Anders

There are a couple settings under object -> properties that might be doing this.

cast shadows.. 
seen in raytracing
min shading rate

I was able to reproduce the same exact results. Reposition the lights and it will look fine without the scaled ball.

Anders,

Try scaling the Body to, say 110%.  Render.  Then try 150% and render.

If I remember correctly, FireFly has a problem with small objects (specially in light of Poser's already infinitessimal object sizes).  That has been mostly rectified in P6 and P7, but it seems that the ShadowCams with Depth map shadows combined with FireFly still don't work well in this regard.

Shadow Blur Radius
Shadow Min Bias
Min Shade Rate

None of these had any affect.  Translating the object did nothing.  Only scaling or adding some other object automagically made this work (?).

onnetz: I tried reposition the lights but had no success, the object was still black.**

**kuroyume0161: Yep, you are correct -- scaling the object seems to do the trick as well. From 101% to 130% nothing happened, but at 140% the textures started to appear and from 150% and up everything looks OK.

Thanks for your help, guys, now I at least know how to work around the problem!

/Anders