Ok - the first one's rendered with the "raytracer" the second with the "hybrid raytracer" What the hell is that? The shadows don't start at the base of the fence post in the hybrid? That's a terrain mesh there if it makes any difference -- any ideas what the problem is or is this one of those "hidden" bugs that still lurk the code of Carrara?

Woops here the "hybrid" pic

HARBINGER-3D, i was having similar problems with objects placed "into" terrain meshes. i had floating metaball trees. i didn't even think of switching renderers, but solved my problem by converting the terrain to the vertex modeler.

top left: Gouraud Preview (tree firmly planted in hill)
top right: Tree takes flight when test rendered
bottom: Final render using vertexed terrain. (tree planted again)

-scott

Interesting that you solved your problem by changing the renderer. This isn't something that's new and it's just a weird result of using terrains. Converting the terrain to a vertix object is probably the best solution. -Kix

Floating objects and shadows is a known issue with Carrara while using the Hybrid Raytracer. (Known only if you've been following the history of the program!) The solutions you've already discovered. Apparently, the solution was more complex than could be acheived by the release of v1.1. Hope it's fixed by 2.0 Mark

There are some gaps that appear when some objects overlap a terrain . This happens only when you use the Hybrid Raytracer, because it is faster it truncates algorithms to take shortcuts i think, and it decreases render quality . Converting to Vertex can be a solution, but you can only have a 256x256 mesh size max . Also, vertex objects take a lot of space and memory compared to terrains, so my advice is : use the Raytracer with terrains ! Actually, this problem does appear with every facets-based objects that overlap, but it is just barely noticeable when there's no terrain around .