I'm using a landscape photograph as a background for reference in posing  and rendering  a V4 figure (which I will render separately and apply to the photo on  layer). With the lighting I'm using shadows generated on the figure are fine, but I can't seem to figure out how to get the figure's shadow cast onto the ground plane (currently there is just the grid). Is there a button or box  I need to check to get the shadow?  All the lights have shadows enabled as ray-traced and the V4 figure also has cast shadows enabled.

Thanks, HG Guy

Very easy, you just have to create a groundplane!

By default there is no groundplane, any figure is loaded at y-position 0, so if you want shadows go to "Create->primitives->plane" you may scale it as you need and hit render.

Another thing, make sure you are using the 3Delight renderengine and not the OpenGL render!

If you want to composite your render with a photo, have a look over at DAZ at PoseWork's pwCatch, correctely applied to the plane, D|S will only render your character plus the shadow but not the rest of the plane, very handy!

Pose over a white background to see all details but render over a black background and save it as .png, so you get the alpha-information integrated.

Another way to get a shadow you can composite is to render once with a ground plane, with its ambient and diffuse colours set to white and ambient strength set to 100% and once with no ground plane. Save both redners as tiff or png to preserve the alpha channel. In your image editor take the image with the ground plane and set it to multiply, then put the image without above that in normal blending mode.

 Thanks to both Akhbour and RHaseltine! That's exactly what I was wanting to know .. I figured it was pretty basic, somehow I didn't make the mental connection of "if you want to cast a shadow you need something to cast a shadow on!"  I thought the grid was the ground plane ...

Thanks again!  HG Guy