I modelled a simple cupboard with poseable drawers.

While the ouside is a wood-texture the inner frame of the drawers should be white (as you can see at the lowest, opened drawer. As in real life the drawer-blinds do not touch each other, but there is a few milimeters space between them. 

Now when rendered there are allways that ugly white stripes visible because the insides of the drawers are bright white and "shine" through to the outside.

Lights are not facing directly from front but from upward down. Lights are point-ligths with AO turned off and shadows depth-mapped. At this setting I would expect the insides of the drawers almost completely dark (in the shadow) as in real life, not glowing white!

Is there a way to get rid of this effect???

Thanx

Netrunner

Try turning shadows to RayTraced for one.

Ok, just did so and even on all 3 lights, but no difference.

Also changed the lights to almost face 80° down, so there is absolutely no direct light shining into the drawers, but just looking the same :-(

make sure Ambient_Color is set to black, Ambient_Value is set to 0 for all objects.

depending on what you model in, sometimes 3rd party apps will set an ambient color which poser keeps on import, resulting in symptoms similar to these.

Three lights are a bit much, but I wouldn't use depth map lighting if you are striving for realism.  However, you haven't provided enough information to give you better advice.

Which Poser version are you rendering this?

What are your render/light settings?

We can play a thousand question until we arrive at a solution, or give more technical details on your workflow.

Ok, more info:

Ambient Color is 100% black, Ambient Value is 0. I only changed Diffuse to white, everything else is default.
All parts are "visible in raytracing" and "cast shadows" set.

Now I have 3 point lights with raytraced shadows,
Blur Radius 2, Samples 19, Min Bias 0,05, AO off, Athmosperic Strength 0,01

Poser Version: Poser Pro 2010

Render settings Firefly:
Cast Shadows On, Raytracing On, Raytrace Bounces 2, Irrad.caching 50, Indirect lighting Off, pixel samples 5 ( tried up to 12), Min Shading rate 0,1 (tried 0,01 too), all the rest is Poser default.

Thanks so far...

If your shadow min bias is too high, nearby shadow casting objects will be ignored.

Perhaps your drawer front is .5 inch thick and your shadow min bias is .8 inch. In that case, the drawer front cannot cast a shadow within .8 inches of itself.

Take control of lights - learn every parameter.

By the way, that is not how real dressers are assembled. There is a strip of wood between each drawer - the entire front face is wood, even if the inside is plastic.

It looks like all nodes are connected to "alternate diffuse".

If not try switch off 2 lights and last, which is on, set dist start = 0 and dist end = 0.

What is the diffuse_value setting? 1? Just askin'...

Netrunner listed min bias .05, but did not tell us his/her setting of Poser Display Unit - thus the value we were told is useless. Could be feet, meters, or inches, etc.

You're doing something really wrong and not telling us what it is.

my dresser is like that, no face frame at all.  

And this wood shader is available where? :o)

This is the same wood, with a different stain color.

Well that pack should be just as popular as the metal shader pack.

I'm patiently waiting for it, then I have the wood shaders to look forward to. Let's just hope it doesn't take as long to release as the metal shader pack has :oP lol

So I had to re-visit the whole premise - took me a while to get it so I was satisfied.

Here's an example of mixing dialectric and metal.

Here's the natural wood, no stain, as well as a really dark stain. To stain you just pick one color and the shader does the rest.

BB, I think you really enjoy screwing with other people's minds, LOL!!!

Quote - BB, I think you really enjoy screwing with other people's minds, LOL!!!

That's pretty much why I'm here, yes.

cool bb ...  looking forward to it.

The wood and metal shaders will be ideal for some guitar projects I have in mind.

New furniture, new shaders,... :-D

Ok, back to the problem: I finally solved it, thanks to Bills suggestion with the shadow-min-bias value.
Being not really familiar with Poser my fault was the mesh I imported.
I modelled the cupboard in C4D and in a silly attempt to reduce poly-counts I decided to make the blinds and the floors of the drawers as zero-thickness planes, just with "folded" edges, if you know what I mean.

Like this ____/  intstead of a closed form.

In C4D this worked fine, but in Poser this did not cast a shadow as I wished.

By the way: My units are in mm, but shadow min bias value did not change when I changed to inch.

@RobynsVeil: Diffuse Value was 1, now I changed to 0,9 which is way better, thanks for that!

To the final result shown above:

Left is with IDL using BagginBills EnvSphere with an interior HDR picture, one light from left top, white at 80% intensity. shadows raytraced at strenght 1.0, blur 2.0 and min bias 0.05

Right one is without IDL, envsphere deleted, 2 more lights with same settings but fill-light from left at 60% intensity, top-left-light and back-light at 100%

Well I really have to say I start to like the firefly renderer with IDL :-)

 A lot a thanks to all who helped, I really learned a lot!!!

AFAIK, Shadow Min Bias and several other settings are Percentages or something similar, and therefore not subject to changing your Poser units.

Most likely, absolute values, where 1 = theoretical maximum and any number between that and zero is valid.  I could be wrong but I believe that's how it works.  Not that there's anything to stop you putting a higher than 1 value in such slots, other than getting completely barmy results. 

BB, Those are really some  good wood shaders!

I don't know if you need it, but I could give some advice how different kind of wood veneers are used on furniture and how they are varnished.

I can't wait to use the shaders.

Best regards,

Bopper.

Netrunner - yay.

bopper - Thank you. We should start a thread about wood. I wood enjoy a general review of common types of wood.

I have been trying now for 5 years to figure out how to do procedural knots.

Quote - AFAIK, Shadow Min Bias and several other settings are Percentages or something similar, and therefore not subject to changing your Poser units.

Most likely, absolute values, where 1 = theoretical maximum and any number between that and zero is valid.  I could be wrong but I believe that's how it works.  Not that there's anything to stop you putting a higher than 1 value in such slots, other than getting completely barmy results. 

I WISH somebody could tell us about stuff like this. The manual is completely useless, for example: in the hair room - "Root Stiffness" is defined as "the stiffness of the root" (or something similar - I'm quoting from memory). What use is that?

I want to know the units, the minimum, the maximum, the direction, what does 0 mean? what does 1 mean? what does 100 mean?

Oh, I know I can find out, I can do oodles of test tenders that all take forever...

The bloke who wrote the code must have known what he was doing - so why doesn't he tell us what it all means?

At the moment our only chance is to read every single post by BB, who occaisonally turns up with a gem along the lines of: oh, I happened to find out it's an inverse logarithm set in light years and ignoring your poser units, well, that's fine, I can live with that, but PIITFM (Put It In...)

(pi**i)TFM... haha... I quite like that... reminds me that I used to be a nerd hahaha

the knot in the wood grain might be approached as an UV-localised turbulence zone modified by edge blend; however, may one suggest that some of these shaders be sold here, as it might make them feel good.