Hello, New to Poser and digital 3D in general. I'm using the new Poser 11 and seem to be encountering some problems while going through the 6 Project guide tutorials. I cannot get my figures to cast a shadow. The only shadow I see is the ground shadow and that shadow does not move no matter where or at what angle I move the lights. That shadow seems to come from a light straight above at high noon but that shadow will not budge unless I float the figure above the ground.

Ground and Hardware shadow enabled in all renders. 4 Lights (the default lights) in each render DocWindow (There should be a little shadow in the doc window, the tutorial videos have them)

Preview Render yields the same results:

Firefly render gets a bit more realistic but still no shadow for the figure.

Superfly render finally shows a shadow but only one shadow as if there was only one light (there's 4 in the scene, unless the walls are blocking them?) and changes the ocean blue material on the couch to red. I don't get understand that one!

In the last tutorial (tweaking) section 6.3 the Pose dots simply don't work. Click pose dot to save, move figure, click pose dot to revert and nothing happens. Not sure what I'm doing wrong for these two problems if anything.

Have you tried deleting the lights and creating new?

Is the Shadow actually turned on in the light Property?

I really fail at using the pose Dots.... but there are 3 different sets of them, all stacked together.
The Default is UI dots... if you saved there, then the UI Configuration got saved, not your pose....

the choices are UI, Pose & Camera.

Best of luck!!

hborre, I have not itried deleting the lights and adding new ones, I don't think I should have to; however I tried it as you suggested and only added one light to simplify the equation of other light angles canceling each other out. I then moved the light close and kept the angle low. Results look promising. I'll have to continue to play around with it.

That's after the firefly rendering though. Preview rendering still doesn't cast any shadows at all and that was supposed to be the point of the preview rendering, move your lights around, add lights etc... then do a quick preview render to see how the shadows are going to be affected by the new lights and / or their positions.

donnena, yes all the Shadow checkboxes were checked on all the lights in their properties area. In running the test above I did see if I unchecked the Shadows checkbox and did a firefly render their would be no shadow. Checkbox or not still no Shadows in the Preview render though.

I figured out the Poser Dots, what happened was, I'd save my pose under a dot, moved the figure, then the selection would move off of the figure and on to the clothing piece, when I clicked the poser dot to restore it would fail; however if I selected the figure (Alyson) then click the poser dot to restore it would work. However though...... sometimes it would actually restore back to the original pose that you'd get from the Pose library. I think this function is a little buggy.

No, the dots only work if you populate them... if you want them to restore to the original pose, you have to save that. I personally use Control Z and undo what ever mistake I've just made. Do you have shadows turned on in the Preview render? They're off by default, I think. You'll find the manual settings more useful than the sliders, I think.

Yes I did populate the poser dots. I'll open the saved scene you see above, you can see the arms are clearly different than the original pose in which the character Alyson is first added into the scene. Figures > Poser 11 Content > People > Alyson > Alyson. Her hands are out East <-> West as if she were about to get a pat down by TSA. In the tutorial "My first Scene" step 5.4 they have us change the pose of Alyson from the default to Pose > Poser 11 Content > People > Alyson > Standing > Presentation_M. This is the pose I saved in the scene that you see above.

Now moving on to the next tutorial, tutorial #6 "Tweaking" step 6.3 (Click on Pose Dot to save current Pose) step 6.4 & 6.5 move figure, step 6.6 "Click the Pose Dot to restore Alyson to her original pose". Sometimes this will work and sometimes it will restore the pose back to the default pose (or at least I thought, while validating the steps for this response I see her right arm is a bit bent inward in the south east direction though still parallel to the ground), this is NOT the pose I saved in the Pose dot. This feature is not functioning as it should be and is a bit unreliable.

Undo (cntrl + Z) works (to a point) but saving the pose has it's merit. I can forsee changing your pose trying to tweak it the way you want it, think you have it, adjust some other objects in the scene and actually getting those things exactly the way you want, go back to tweaking your figure again and getting it all out of whack or decide that your original pose was better then your tweaks. You can then restore the pose without losing your edits/tweaks for all the other objects in the scene.

In the Render Settings, Preview tab, "Enable Hardware Antialiasing" is checked, <- "Hardware shading supported" is displayed in green text between these two options -> "Enable hardware shadows" is checked. Depth bias 4.000. Enable hardware AO is not checked (I don't know what AO stands for) I tried checking it and rendering, still no shadow in the preview rendering.

AO is Ambient Occlusion. it makes shadows look more real and increases render time! it's generally not wanted on the scene preview. Ok.. I opened P11 with Andy Front and Center and confirmed my Preview render settings are the same as yours.... When I grab a light and swing it around the scene, the shadow for that light moves. I have 3 or 4 shadows in the scene, all displaying on the ground plane. Here's a screen shot of my settings.... and part of Andy's shadows...

While I'm sending screen shots... this option is checked for the lights, right??

I'm mystified!!

Yup my Preview Render settings were all the same as yours except I didn't have "Remove backfacing polys" checked. I do now and it didn't make a difference either. I've opened Poser 11, let the default scene load (Andy2), I turned off lights 1, 3 & 4. Light 2 defaults intensity is 3,000, I changed it from an Area Light to a Spot Light, turned on Ground Shadows (Display > Ground Shadows). We'd expect to see a shadow going from left to right. No shadows in preview window or with preview rendering.

And here's the results from the Firefly rendering:

Thanks for testing and troubleshooting! I'm stumped as well.

<-- Grasping at straws... Didja download & install the Service Release?

(removing the back facing polys just tells poser not to render any polys who are not facing the camera. This means if you have a mirror Behind Andy, his back side would not show up in the mirror. Because I have NO patience, I have that turned off in Preview. This would have no effect on shadows showing up)

Yes, installed all possible updates. I'm running version 11.0.1.31230 on Windows 10.

Just a quick browse through this thread, so sorry if this has already been suggested. In your first post you asked if the walls could be blocking the lights. Have you checked this? If you switch to the shadow cam for each light, and have back facing polys shown, you will be able to see if the walls are between the lights and the scene. s

Thanks for the reply. However, I rendered that theory irrelevant by bringing up the default figure, turning off all the lights except one and changing it to a spotlight type light. You can see the preview casts no shadow and the firefly render casts a shadow as expected.

Regards,

That is true with all the other Poser versions. So, no, Poser is not broken, don't expect to see actual light cast shadows in preview

Window > 5-First Project > Lesson 5.20: Preview Rendering "Any time you want to quickly examine changes in lighting or materials, click the Render icon in upper right corner of the Document window. Your render preview will appear in the Render tab.

Preview renders will not be as detailed as final renders. For example, they don't include reflections or more advanced material settings. However, preview renders are used frequently to check lighting and material changes that you cannot see in the document window."

Makes sense to me; however I have no experience with any previous versions, so if this is the way it is for everybody then so be it. Documentation doesn't fit the intended functionality.

Resolved! Seems we overlooked the obvious, the video card. I was using the built in video card Intel(R) HD Graphics.

I installed the NVIDIA GTX960 graphics card and I now see the shadows in preview mode and preview type renders. Performance increase with the new graphics card though..... Can't say I really see an improvement. I'll start a new thread for the performance discussion so this one can be closed.