Even with IDL, if there's nothing around your figure reflecting light onto her, then the areas in shadow will be black. Here and there, her own lit skin can light other nearby skin areas. But in this render, for example, her right wrist can only be lit by her right buttock. Since both are in shadow, both are black.

I don't know how you did the background. Unless it is a real object behind her, such as an image attached to a square, then there's no ambient light around her at all. (The Poser "Background" is not an object - it is what your virtual "paper" has on it before the figure is drawn on top.)

Build a room around her, and you'll get ambient reflected light. Place my environment sphere around her, and you'll get ambient light from the environment sphere. If you do neither of those things, then she'll look like she's being photographed floating in space with nothing around for millions of miles. In that case you should use an IBL to provide synthetic ambient lighting. With IDL, the IBL provides the starting point for ambient lighting. Then IDL will bounce it around amongst your actual 3D objects.

As for the hard edge on the shadows, you probably didn't change the shadow blur radius, so the radius is 0, i.e. no blur at all. Soft shadows are accomplished by specifying a blur value. Many people think that's only for depth-mapped shadows, but it isn't. With a point light, only ray-traced shadows are possible, but they can be soft if you set it up that way.

However, a point light is more complicated than a spotlight, resulting in extra rendering time that you don't really need. A point light is best used in a 3D room to model a light bulb located within that room, throwing light in all directions. If you're just going to do an isolated portrait like this, you'd do better to use a spotlight. Of course, you'll want to position the spotlight and adjust its cone angle and angular falloff to create a nice effect.

Lighting in Poser seems mysterious, but with Poser 8 it can be very realistic and easy to set up. The thing to realize is that if you don't know how to light a subject in a blackened studio, then you're not going to know how to light a subject in Poser, either.

With Poser 8, you can actually use spotlights, gobos, reflectors, walls, etc to create interesting lighting.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)