I made some skin textures for V4 and rendered it in Poser Pro:

Notice that the shadowed areas are way too dark.  What can I do to fix that?

It could come from your shader. What does it look like?

If you're not using global illumination (called Indirect Lighting in Poser 8) and you don't have fill lighting directly illuminating a shadow cast by another light, and the material is not itself emitting a color (ambient) then the shadow will be black.  Solutions are use fill lights, use a really wonky material, or (imo best by far) render with global illumination (Poser 8 and beyond).  Takes time though.

 Also, your shadows might be turned too high. Under the light parameter tab look for "Shadow". Be default, it is set to "1" which is unnaturally high. Sunlight has a Shadow of .912.  The lower you set it, the dimmer the shadow will appear in a render. Play with that and see what you'll like.

On the second tab of the light is Properties. On it you'll find the blur radius. For Ray-traced shadows it's set at "0) which means hard-edged shadows (Which occur in a hard vacuum!). The higher the blur, the softer the edge is.

Play with those two, and some fill lights and you'll do fine!:laugh:

Quote -  Also, your shadows might be turned too high. Under the light parameter tab look for "Shadow". Be default, it is set to "1" which is unnaturally high. Sunlight has a Shadow of .912.  The lower you set it, the dimmer the shadow will appear in a render. Play with that and see what you'll like.

I dont recommand this "tweak" if you use IBL or IDL or a fill light, only with one light source

Quote - On the second tab of the light is Properties. On it you'll find the blur radius. For Ray-traced shadows it's set at "0) which means hard-edged shadows (Which occur in a hard vacuum!). The higher the blur, the softer the edge is.

As i can see in the picture, shadowmap are used, i agree with you raytracing shadows take better results !

Quote - Sunlight has a Shadow of .912.

No, it doesn't.  What that's saying is that for a 100% opaque material, 8.8% of sunlight will still pass through it.  Which is not correct.

That "lowering the shadow intensity" thing is a kluge left over from the older Poser days when IBL and IDL were not available to provide the ambient light that will make your shadows less intense.  The effect is the same---shadows that aren't dark---but one way is changing the rules of reality and the other recreates how those shadows become less dark in the real world.

 I'm talking relative shadows as measured by bagginsbill in a study he did with one of his paint programs on sunlit shadows. If you don't have accurate IBLs, you can fake it.

ALSO--poser 7 and less users do NOT have access to IDL and it is foolish to assume all Poser users use the same version of Poser.

If you have Poser 5 or less... yes, do the cheat with the sunlight shadow thing. It's probably the only way (apart from adding a hundred or so low-intensity lights pointing into the scene from every angle) to do sunlight in those programs.  It's not how light really works, though, since 8.8% of light will not pass through something that's 100% opaque.

But from P6 onward, I would always recommend that lights be kept to shadow intensity 1.0 wherever possible and some kind of global illumination (IBL or IDL, or both if you have them) to recreate the way that ambient/indirect light will naturally reduce the intensity of the shadows, just as it does in the real world.

As I said, both get the same result. But one way is mimicking reality and the other is just making stuff up as long as the final result looks okay.  I prefer the former.

I have never really liked the look that semi-transparent shadows gives you, it always looked wonky to me.  Maybe some people can get good results out of it, personally I'm just not that interested to do a lot of fussing and testing when GI is now part of the Poser toolset.

Quote -  Also, your shadows might be turned too high. Under the light parameter tab look for "Shadow". Be default, it is set to "1" which is unnaturally high. Sunlight has a Shadow of .912.  The lower you set it, the dimmer the shadow will appear in a render. Play with that and see what you'll like.

On the second tab of the light is Properties. On it you'll find the blur radius. For Ray-traced shadows it's set at "0) which means hard-edged shadows (Which occur in a hard vacuum!). The higher the blur, the softer the edge is.

Play with those two, and some fill lights and you'll do fine!:laugh:

I've forgot all about changing the light properties.  Thanks for pointing that out.  I've spent too much time in the materials room.  Adjusting the blur radius seems to give the best result.

Quote - If you're not using global illumination (called Indirect Lighting in Poser 8) and you don't have fill lighting directly illuminating a shadow cast by another light, and the material is not itself emitting a color (ambient) then the shadow will be black.  Solutions are use fill lights, use a really wonky material, or (imo best by far) render with global illumination (Poser 8 and beyond).  Takes time though.

Where in Poser 8 are the GI settings located?  And how do you create a fill light?  Is that the same as an infinite light?

Quote - It could come from your shader. What does it look like?

I still don't know what a shader is.  I'm quite new to Poser.

Quote - Where in Poser 8 are the GI settings located?  And how do you create a fill light?  Is that the same as an infinite light?

Poser calls its implementation of Global Illumination this:  "Indirect Lighting".  If you look in your render settings, there is a checkbox "Indirect Lighting" and a group of controls for same.  You should probably spend some time reading the manual to get an idea of what they do, and also this particular tutorial Vince wrote is pretty good:
http://www.vincebagna.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=75&Itemid=42

If you want to learn about lighting (and you should) then this book will explain many many things:
http://www.3drender.com/light/index.html

Thanks for the links.

you're using Poser Pro.  do you have gamma correction enabled?  your shadows are not only too dark, they look wrong altogether.  maybe i'm wrong, but it doesn't look like you're using correction.

oh, and yeah, IBL is way better than the shadow trick.  it's not nearly as accurate as true GI, but it's still better than making the lights inaccurate.

Quote - you're using Poser Pro.  do you have gamma correction enabled?  your shadows are not only too dark, they look wrong altogether.  maybe i'm wrong, but it doesn't look like you're using correction.

I had "Use Gamma Value from Render Settings" checked for each texture map.

Quote -   oh, and yeah, IBL is way better than the shadow trick.  it's not nearly as accurate as true GI, but it's still better than making the lights inaccurate.

You're right.  IBL lighting does give a much better result.

I don't think my version of Poser Pro has GI because I can't find the settings for it anywhere.

If it's a version you bought, then it does not have GI / Indirect Lighting, that's available in the next version which hasn't been released yet.

There is Gc in your render settings.  Be aware, adding Gc to your scene will necessitate a reduction in light intensity.  That is what you are seeing in your last posted render, an overlit scene.

and it's not on if your GC value is 1. make sure it's around 1.8 or 2.2.