You can make your window glasses separate objects and set them to not cast shadows.

Post wireframes of your building in the scene (use the preview wireframe renderer and take a screenshot.
Is there glass in the windows?
What version of Poser are you using?

No.

lol, thanks.  I'll wash the locomotive and see you tomorrow.

Ill try setting up the material with AO instead of the lights.

Okay I'll set it up for smoothing.

I rendered it with Poser default light and no lines appeared, then rerendered with my IBL light -- I'm now wondering whether my AO settings cause those lines.  The light is in your Runtime/Lights/EnvPanorama folder -- will you take a look at the AO setting in the IBL light please.

Your reflective shaders look good; are you saying the renderer itself is randomly throwing artifacts in?

Quote - Here is with real reflection, with a Fresnel effect. It gets messed up right away.

Yeeeoooow. what causes that?

Quote - This is how it renders without reflection. This is close to the material you gave me - I tweaked it a little bit, but its still using a fake reflection via Sphere_Map and an image.

There are no artifacts.

So we know now that so far, with fake reflection, no artifacts, and real reflection, artifacts?

Quote - Here's what I mean. I put your displacement map and just a Reflect node on. (I have a 3D environment photo around the train.)

I increased the Raybias on the Reflect node to 5 inches. This means it will ignore any self-reflections within 5 inches of the original reflection point. Now on this model, the cylinder cannot reflect itself without displacement. However, with displacement, it seems to be confused about what part sticks out where. Increasing the Raybias made it less confused.

I'm confused about the cylinder reflecting itself.  What do you mean?  I see the black artifacts, but the areas around the bolts look good.  Should I cut a line in each side of each band around the boiler?

I've now reinstalled P7 and am setting up a render:  you're the second to post a render with no trouble, so I thought maybe my installation was corrupted.  We will know in a few minutes.  Here's the other good render.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2719401&page=2

"The animation looks excellent, well done, the pistons and pipes, etc, move better..." 

Thanks for laying the groundwork!

"Something I can't figure out. What is the function of the placeholder dial, it doesn't do anything and isn't linked to anything."

The placeholder is just that:  a placeholder.  I am thinking of rigging each car to sway a bit in time with the train moving; I just put it in the Tender to remind myself because the Locomotive and the Carriage already have ERC code in them

"1) Open each object file in UV Mapper, save with the "Don't export material file option", and then you can delete the .mtl files from the geometry folder, Poser doesn't use them at all."

Ok; I always delete the .mtl file for finals.  I left it in here since its WIP.

"2) On some object parts, like the body of the locomotive, you don't want people to use smoothing, it makes the model balloon, so you can turn it off by unchecking that check mark, and saving the model. Or in the CR2 just change:
 smoothPolys 1
 to:
 smoothPolys 0 
for the parts you don't want smoothing. This way you can leave it on for wheels and off for the body."

Great!  So I dont have to split all the parts, only the ones that will be smoothed?

 
Correct

*"3) You may want to hide dials you don't want people to be turning. For example, if the wheel turns only using the X-rot dial, you can hide the y-rot and z-rot. The less there is for the user to mess up, the better."

Will do.  In fact VK, in his toytrain seems to have deleted them entirely with no ill effect. I also will make the PistonTargets invisible and set to cast no shadows.

No, look carefully at what VK did. I am not sure if that was the method he used, but I taught him to hide body parts. In the CR2, there is a line:
 hidden 0
 If you set that to 1, then that body part doesn't show in the dial section, and that part cannot be selected. So for example, if you don't want the user to be able to select the wheels, then you set them to 1, and they will not be selectable, and their dials will not show at all. I do this with most of my models.

"4) The next thing is just nit picking. On a real train, the wheels do not all turn at the same speed. The small wheels turn faster than the large ones. For example, if the large wheel has a diameter of 2 metres, and the small wheel has a diameter of 1 metre, the small wheel will turn twice as fast as the large wheel."

I thought they were all covering the same amount of rail distance; I'll look at that again.  For the movement, I calculated the circumference of the drive wheels and moved the train that far in one cycle of 360 degrees.  I suppose I'll need to work backwards from that to determine the degrees of rotation for the smaller wheels.

They are. So a wheel with a 2 metre diameter turns once, and covers 2 meters. A wheel with a 1 metre diameter must turn twice to cover two meters, so it must turn twice as fast as the big wheel. I have an entire tutorial and a calculator I made in Excel that automates all of the calculations for working this out. I will send it to you tommorow.

I'll reinstall Poser now and see if that cures it here.

Smoothing off.  I've tried to avoid having to split verts on all those little detail parts in 72 groups, though at the same time keeping it low-poly enough for fast animation.  It's looking like I might have to smooth it though (lots of extra work, but a better result.)

Are you rendering with displacvement ON in render settings and the bumpmap node connected to displacement in the shader?  If so I wonder if maybe I've changed something in my P7 installation that would cause it.

I've sent it to a few others too so if we can all post findings here int his thread it can help everyone.

Check sitemail.

Quote - i need some places to get more lights for poser 7

I have some in the Renderosity market:

Environment Panorama (Vol.A)
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=63717&vendor=94968

Environment Panorama (Vol.B)
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=63716&vendor=94968