Quote - I agree that one would fail, because the depth mapped shadows (as implemented in Poser) do not have variable blur based on distance from occlusion.

I'm not picking on Poser here, depth mapped shadows look bad in all rendering apps (that's what I was saying).  There are situations where the fact that they look bad doesn't matter, but I don't like to screw around with that when I only do still frames anyway (like the vast majority of Poser users).  For animation it is a lot less of an issue because the viewer doesn't have as much time to notice how fake this or that element may look, it's more about how convincing the movement of the animation is.

Quote - Further, I can't even demo that because I used a point light. I can't use a spot light because it doesn't go 180 degrees.

So no area lights, I take it.

Quote - I'm not sure why DM shadows do not have a variable blur option. It wouldn't be that hard to implement.

I hadn't looked into it that hard but I know it's a pretty uncommon feature (can't think of a commercial renderer that does it).  I did find a paper on such techniques:
http://www.whdeboer.com/papers/smooth_penumbra_trans.pdf

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