can we somehow turn of casting shadows in the material room? for example i dont want that the lashes cast shadows. can this be done?

as far as I know, you cant turn do this.

I tried this once in P5, by pushing everything through translucence, ambience, etc

nothing got rid of the shadows.

You could use the grouping tool to select the lashes material group and create a new lash prop (parent this to head), which can then have the 'cast shadows' disabled in the object properties. Just takes a few minutes.

but what if use expressions on the face and the eyes? will they change?

how to use the grouping tool to select the lashes?

i think it would be very good and practical if in poser 8 we would have those options in the material room. turning of shadows and AO in the material room. so i could for example use light based AO and then in the material room i would turn of the AO on specific parts.

Set the transparency to 99%, or .99.

Use a Refract node to find out what the transparency is revealing. Make whatever you want for the shader (diffuse, specular, etc.) and add those up. Subtract the Refract node from that. Multiply the result by 99 and plug into Alternate_Diffuse.

You now have a material that acts very close to transparent but in fact is opaque. It will block your view, but not block light (i.e. will not cast a shadow).

In the case of lashes, you also want to honor the transparency map, which means to control where you apply the (diffuse + specular - refract).

i didnt want to just make the shadows invisible. i wanted to speed up the render. will this speed up the render?

Lol...bb, that's cool. The power of math.

ice-boy - sounds like bb's material room solution is the way to go.

Not sure about the render speed using refraction etc. The grouping tool option might still offer a solution for static renders.

well i only wanted this because of the speed. ratryaced blurry reflection will make a render very long when i have a lot of transparency.

still thanks BB.

For the new lash prop option:

1. Morph your character how you want (including how you want the lashes).
2. Open the grouping tool and click 'New Group', and give the new group a name.
3. Use the 'Assign Material' button and select the lashes material group from the dropdown.
4. Click 'Create Prop' and select a name for it.
5. Parent the new lashes prop to the figure head and turn off the 'cast shadows' in the object properties.
6. Make the original lashes fully transparent in the material room and assign the lash nodes to the new lash prop.

Note - if you use scaling in the figure morphing you may need to go down a slightly different route.

dumb me. i meant raytraced blury shadows.

P.S. you need to have your character how you want it in your final render, including pose and expression etc before making the new prop.
If the character includes scaling you'd export the head geometry with the default options and re-import it with only the 'Make polygon normals consistent' box checked and create the new lash prop from this.

thanks for all this. will try to use it.

Quote -
i didnt want to just make the shadows invisible. i wanted to speed up the render. will this speed up the render?

Nope - it will slow down the render. But I don't recall you stating that as a constraint on the solution. This is a classic engineering mishap. You must state what you're trying to do. Instead, you imagined a tactic and asked for how to implement the tactic. That's what you got. :)

he he sorry.

By the way, lest you think this little tactic is not relevant to anything, let me make it "clear" that it is a very important technique.

For example, I offer you this challenge.

Make a thin glass material in Poser that is transparent, perhaps with a selectable tinted color, and does NOT cast a shadow, but does exhibit true refraction instead of straight-line transparency.