So when I open up a new document in PoserPro 2012 it has these super realistic shadow casting lights that aren't in any of my PZ3's made with earlier versions of Poser.  It also displays textures very differently and seemingly with more detail.  I have tried to replicate this in old PZ3's and I can't seem to do it.

Are these light settings?  Is there some kind of preview rendering setting I don't know about besides Open GL and Seed?  Switching that on my old PZ3's has had no effect.

If anyone could fill me in, that would be awesome.  Thanks...

If P9/PP2012 opens an "old" P8 or earlier scene, it defaults to having HW Shading Off. This has been done because memory requirements for HW Shading are higher and you could have a situation where you potentially are unable to load a scene created in an earlier version of Poser.

Solution is simple: Load the scene and turn HW Shading on in the Render settings in the Preview tab.

I am not at home to try, but what happens if one IMPORTS the PZ3 file instead of opening it?

lmk

It keeps the settings from the host scene

One other thing: If you do NOT want HW Shading on by default, just set it off and set as preferred scene in General Preferences and switch On Launch with preferred scene

One thing you can also do is the Add a new scene to the existing from the library (the new category in P9/PP2012). I use it to set up scenery and use it to add to existing scenes

Thanks for the help everyone... very informative.

In PP2012 loaded a complicated scene from PP2010 and turned on hardware shading. The resulting shadows in preview were terrible: blocky and solid black. And it slowed down the program's response considerably. Not worth it in this case.

I haven't yet built a big scene from scratch in PP2012 to know if the preview shadows remain accurate, and if they bog down the works, as more and more shadow-casting objects are added.

You can increase the shadowmap size for the preview shadows. (Rendersettings, preview tab)