good afternoon. i seem to have run into a very odd poser rendering issue. i was rendering some images for thumbnails  and i ran into a very odd result. which i first thought was a problem with this particular install of poser 8. so, i tried running it on poser pro, and i saw the same result.
so, i wiped the system, windows xp pro media center edition sp3. after the re-install (patched) i had the same result.
at that point i transferred the files to a windows vista machine, and tried again. and in doing so, i found it also showed the same result. yellow border

then i began to think it was probably the model. but, i had previous test renders of groups of items which looked fine. so, i decided to run a couple tests on other items i have created, with it, and they all worked fine.

the next 'logical' step was to find a similar shape item, which i found in
..poser8runtimelibrariespropsposer 8misc propscan
it is a simple two part prop which resembles a soup can.
i used the exact same settings, default lights, and render settings on firefly set for final.
and i received the same result. brown border

when i turn shadows off, i get an interesting effect. the lid object still cast a shadow, but the can does not. as illustrated in the red image

so, i then thought about it, and remembered groups of items worked, so i added the bowl from the same directory, which is part of the poser 8 default install. the end result is shown in the blue image

so, i began to experiment, and i found that items with a cyllindrical nature were even in groups providing the same shadow error, but the addition of a none cyllindrical item, as is depicted in the green image, works fine.

has any other here experienced this? and if so, have you discovered a solution?

Poser (at least version 7 and maybe 8 by the looks of it) has problems rendering shadows of small props if that's all there is in the scene, you can either scale the prop up or add something else.  I believe it's down to the way Firefly works out shadow maps ("Badly" I think is the expression)

The square shadow routine, got that a couple of times today.  Both times it was one of the light sources.  I deleted the culprit and generated a new one in its place.  Sounds strange.  However it fixed the problem both times.  I use Poser 8.  Jan

Are you using map shadow or raytracing shadow ?

raytracing shadows

If you add another ground plane (high res square) to cast the shadows on, the problem disappears,
(or you can increase the size of the prop, which is probably not what you want)