crispy, carrara also has shadow-mapped lites, but I don't like them either.  depth-mapped shadows can give good results, but set the shadow map size to something much higher than default.  it's interesting you mention the problem of a figure not casting shadows on itself.  the first time I saw somebody say this was in legume's poser newsgroup in re: poser 4, which had only shadow-mapped lites, and they were completely misunderstood.