If it is in a scene with another object loaded first things seem fine but if it is alone in a scene the entire object is obscured by a couple of large rectangular shadows once it is rendered, now Im thinking I have missed a step or something in setting up the material zones or something but am at a loss as to what.

Any help would be much appreciated, also any links to tutorials that show the full work-flow of creating a basic prop or object would be great.

Ive attched a pic if it helps.

Cheers Kurg

This came up a little while back.  Your object is very small, and Poser's depthmapped shadows don't seem to like to render properly for very small objects.  Scale up your model, or add some larger object to the scene and it should render OK.  I would bet that the 2nd image was rendered with raytraced shadows.

yea your right it was raytraced, although it was on the first as well I think? guess the standard lights dont cut it lol
I was thinking it was a shadow issue,

Thanks!!
:)

Quote - I would bet that the 2nd image was rendered with raytraced shadows.

May be he can decrease the shadow min bias in the light properties ... 0.8 -> 0.05 for exemple ...

The problem doesn't happen when you have a large object in the scene along with the small object, like your example above - it's when you have a very small object alone in the scene where that happens.  I didn't find any combination of settings for depthmapped shadows that worked, but then I didn't look very hard once I realized you just need to scale the object up (since it's alone in the scene who cares?)