What is the min shadow bias parameter?

The light settings DO affect the shadow-cam view, but the Percentage (in s-cam dials) ALSO affects it. Your pic above still has the "floaty-feet" shadow flaw. You still need to adjust the s-cam to be rid of that unnatural gap between the feet and the base of the shadow. It takes some experimenting to find useful correlations between all the settings.

Your pic shows the exact problem I was having (over and over) which is now a thing of the past due to proper shadow-cam adjustment. I have adopted the procedure of using a set of lights for illumination with no shadows, and a set of shadow-casting lights placed strategically to allow easy shadow-cam settings. Usually you will need to decrease the Percentage dial, which will cause the extreme foreshortening to lessen. I am learning to use P5, and to avoid the shadow-mapping by using ray-traced shadows.

The missing ingredient is the Shadow-Cameras. Each light has a corresponding shadow-cam which controls and focuses the shadow. The shadow is created as a seperate render and composited into the final pic. If you go to the camera list and choose the shadow cam for each light, adjust the percentage until the view is approximately filled by the figure which will cast the shadow. When you select the shadow-cam, the view will be thru it, as it is a camera of sorts. I received a lot of help from Nance on this subject. The damned feature is not documented anywhere I can find. The larger the End Angle of the light is, the more diffused the shadow will be. It is also good to experiment with the light's distance values.

I own it. At present, it converts V2 body/head textures to V3 and vice-versa. It works very well and I use it a lot. Minimal retouch may be needed for some textures. More figure conversions are to be added as plugins.

I use Macromedia Fireworks 3 for laying out pages and adding text and fx. It works great for this. It has layers and vector-based graphics. Although FW3 was intended as a web-graphics tool, it is also a great comic-art tool. As for formats, I save as .psd - very versatile format.

Indeed, V3 is far easier to use. I can get the filesize down to 13mb for my heavily customised characters. Kate, please do not give up on V3. She is a fantastic figure. Once you understand how to use the INJ poses, everything is very streamlined and fast compared to earlier versions.

That's a nice pic! There is one suggestion I have to improve it - get the free NoGloNostrils prop by Traveler at Morphworld3 and use it to get rid of those light-emitting nostrils! This prop is the single most useful addition to Poser I have. It's amazing how much better every render looks with it. I have found that the Vicki version works with V3 with a little dial tweaking.

It works fine for me.

A truckload of THANKS to everyone responding to this thread! Somehow my settings got changed about a month ago, and I could not figure out how to get the dl's working as they always had for 10 years. I am glad I took the time to see what this thread was about! I felt quite AAARRRGGGHHH! about this situation myself. What a relief!

I fail to see what I said that is blackmail. I have every right to not buy from those espousing practices I disagree with. SteffyZZ made no attempt to reach an amicable deal with the buyers she DICTATED to. That is the factor which offends me. She should pursue justice against the pirates, not the innocent Buyers. If any Vendor is unhappy with this site's policies you have the option to exert your freedom of choice and go elsewhere to peddle your wares. As for the pirates, please DO inform the Buyers of this transgression. I will certainly avoid them when it is clear that they are committing piracy. I have no sympathy for them.

I guess my approach is to adopt an Every-Buyer viewpoint. I am not so ego-centric to think any comment not directly addressed to me is. As I see it, the moderators are staying out of this, and I can understand why. Anyone answering your baited question the wrong way could fall under tos banning for supporting warez. So, yes, that is a baited question. So tell me momcat, if I buy a character package that later turns out to be a pirated version of your Kaede character, are you going to ban me from using it, even if I have committed weeks of work on a project containing said file? Or will you try to find a way to get us both thru to a workable solution?

Trying to bait me, eh Momcat? That is not the same situation! I would know immediately that the item was a pirated good. I only buy from legitimate sites. I would contact my credit-card company and stop payment. For software, I buy directly from the author, not resellers. I will not punish Renderosity or responsible vendors for the poor business sense of some vendors here. It seems a lot of members are trying their best to convince me not to shop here.

The importance of this issue stems from this potential situation: I have a paid project to finish. I buy an item here to help get me to that goal. I am nearly finished with 2 weeks of work on the job, and lo-and-behold, I am commanded to stop using the item. This causes me a major problem. I must find a substitute for the item, and redo the entire project. That is a serious situation.

All of these ideas are a no-win situation for the buyers. If Renderosity must make more binding contracts, then there is more work to do to enforce the new rules. So they will have to raise their share of the profits therefore raising the prices of all the goods. So then everything will cost more, and less will be sold. The only easy answer is for the vendors to adopt buyer-friendly policies. I am amazed that some vendors are advocating suing this site. They should be booted from here immediately. Anyone advocating taking legal action against this site is becoming a problem for me, since I shop here. These vendors are also added to my No Buy list. They are compounding the damages from the piracy. Many buyers are agreeing with my stance, so these un-professional vendors are digging their hole ever deeper. The one power I have in this situation is the ability to vote with my money! Come on all vendors, put it out in the open, so I know who is cool and who is a fool! If you want to punish buyers for being buyers, I want to know about it. So do all the other shoppers.