I'm using Poser 11 and whenever I use the picture background, when rendering, I have to hide the ground, but doing so, the shadows of the character or object do not appear on the background picture and at the end, I have to use Photoshop to create the shadow over the background picture.

So I'd like to know if it's possible to render the shadow of a character or an object over the Picture background.

Thank You.

It is possible.  What you need to do is hide the Ground prop and use a square ground plate as your surface.  The plate can be found in the Props Primitive folder.  Select the ground plate and enter the material room, open the Wacro panel on the right and click Set up Shadow Catcher (Yellow Highlight).  Clicking the button will activate the Shadow_Catch_Only (Red Highlight) check box on the PoserSurface.  Set both Diffuse_Color and Specular_Color to black (Green Highlight),  

Make sure that the figure/object is positioned on the ground plate and the ground plate placed in its final position.  I recommend that the Cast shadows and Light emitter features for the ground plate be turned off.  Position your light accordingly and tweak the settings so the shadows match the background image.  Assuming that you are using the Firefly render engine, you should have an image that is posted below:

Thank you.  It was just a quick throw-together render, but I'm glad you like it.

I believe that feature only works in firefly renders. 

I wish to thanks to everybody for this important help.

One more time I learn many important things.

hborre, unfortunately I couldn't. I tried to follow your tutorial, step by step, as you can see by the sequence of images I'm sending, but in the end, the shadow did not appear in the background picture.

Can you watch these images and tell me what I did wrong???

hborre

I finally made it.

Your tutorial was absolutely correct.

I believe that feature only works in firefly renders. 

Dear hborre and Boni  I created an image dedicated to you, who helped me to render shadow over background picture using Poser 11.

The image is in my gallgia with the thanks to you.

Dear hborre and Boni  I created an image dedicated to you, who helped me to render shadow over background picture using Poser 11.

The image is in my gallgia with the thanks to you.