I set up a scene yester day in Poser 5, and did a draft rendering the main window, and all was well. I bumped it up to production, and started it again in a new window at 2025 pixels wide. At the base of the railing object, I got some weird vertical shapes that didn't appear in the earlier version. I re-rendered it in draft mode again int he main window, and it was as it should be. I went back to full size in a window, but this time left the setting on draft, and shapes came back. The left image is the big, production render, and the right one is the small draft mode.

Draft mode mean faster render with sloppy job Waldoo

Uh - I know what draft mode means, thanks. I think the problem stems from the ray-traced reflections on the surfaces. Every time I use ray-traced reflections on a big render, I get weird shapes that shouldn't be there. I know these aren't shadows from the lights, so I think it's a bug in the renderer.

Draft mode actually seems to be nothing more than a collection of standard render settings that favour speed over quality. It doesn't necessarily imply sloppiness, just lower quality or less features, such as ray tracing. Given this, you may want to try fiddling with some of the individual settings, "remove back facing polygons" seems to be an obvious candidate that may give you some insight into where the problem is coming from. Ray traced shadows may also be a candidate. Bill

Those reflections would be -almost- right if the surface were meant to be water. Just thinking geometrically, I wonder if those things result from too many bounces on the raytrace? The default is 4; have you tried turning it down to 1?

I'll try the backface options. None of the lights have ray-traced shadows, and they're not in a place where they would cast shadows. There are a lot of settings to play with, but the reflections have been giving me fits. Thanks, Bill.

I'll try that. too. Thanks!

I took a close look at your pics. I can see the circle in both pics, it looks like fractions from two or more sources. It could be from columns under the rail. Can you move one of the column and render it again? I would like to see the result. Waldoo

trying turning off shadows in renderer and on the prop turn off cast shadows. Ron

I've had some odd problems of second-order reflections as well (reflections of reflections), and I see that you have a lot of reflective objects, so adjusting the number of bounces may well solve your problem.