O.k. I did for sure what Tyger_purr did since the previous post said to use find replace. I created the light set. Closed Poser. Opened .lt2 in wordpad. Did find and replace spotLight with light00. Saved the wordpad file. (did not check to see if it had .txt on the end.) Reopened the file on Poser launch. Used python script to delete old light set. Applied the modified light set. Rendered. Still no shadows. I'm not sure if wordpad changed the extension, but the lightset applied. I was suspicious that it hadn't changed anything, but I could see the altered code in the wordpad file. I saved over the original lightset from wordpad. Should I name it something else? Did I go wrong anywhere else in the procedure? Also, I am interested to know about working with the file and the lights after this had been done. Say I delete lights, alter the pose of the figure, etc, etc. (It seems that adding lights as needed is going to be a problem right off, cuz everytime you add one you'll have to go thru this just to see what it's doing.) Can now we just save the file and have the shadows working when the file is opened? Without having to reapply the light set again? I can spend a week test rendering lights. Thanks so much!

I will try today the step by step method, cuz now I see that maybe I wasn't doing it right. Question, if you changed the new spotlight to an infinite light, why would it still read as spotLight in the .lt2? That's what I had a problem with last night. All my lights (20 in all) were infinite lights (I use homemade HDRI light sets). The .lt2 unless I was looking in the wrong place, didn't list the lights as spotlights. I tried to do the same test with Don instead of a ball, and I could not reproduce the results. I will tonight with your copy of the code try to reproduce the results above. I have to confess I don't see why this would work. Changing the name to lights that cast shadows seems simple enough, but why would P4 renderer call them correctly while Firefly wouldn't? With the number of lights I use, I now see why you've called this a tedious workaround. I guess I can change them all at once, so it's not so bad. This bug makes Daz3d's global lighting packs useless, right? Unless you do the hack on the .lt2? Man I am starting to get depressed again! LOL! I think I needed to find the light listings under the shadowcam calls. I'll try again and let you know. Thanks for the more details!

I still can't get anything to work. I've tried all the suggestions presented and I can't get any shadows on any lights beyond the default lights. I finally e-mailed CL tech support.

Whoo-hoo! I was getting very depressed that I really couldn't do anything with Poser. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I can now go back to work.

Hmmm! I tried the other stuff last night, delete shadow.tmp files, switch back and forth between P4 renderer and p5, all to no avail. I am so glad you found this! I don't know how you did it. After you've renamed the light in the .lt2 file then you just use the light sets from the shelf without having to rename, right? That's not so bad. I assume you can edit the .lt2 file in wordpad? Thanks very much!

I have had to drop the bucket size (feldgrobe) down to 8 before to get a monster scene to render, it takes longer, but eventually goes through. Also you might set the rendering-minimum rate higher than .5 if you can stand to. Maybe 1.0? And your picture is huge. Ynsean may be right that it's over the top.

Thanks for the tips!!! I'll try those next time... I haven't had a chance to rollback yet. But I was getting this problem without reposing anything. As you can see Tyger_purr posted an experiment that caused the problem by just adding an infinite light. This seems to be so intermitant it's been a real boggle trying to find just one thing that might be causing it.

Jshoen mentions this in passing in a more recent post. I'm going to say screw it and rollback. I'm waitng til CL gets this fixed. I went to e-mail tech support and I'm at work and don't have my Poser Serial #. I will do it when I get home. Thanks Tyger_purr!

I'm sure that I had no problems in sr3. Dr. Geep once said that sometimes lights have shadow cams and other times do not, don't know the reason... I was starting to suspect that if a light winds up with no shadow cam, maybe now it won't have a shadow, but I have not verified this as I am at work now. I hope we can get it nailed down with a workaround or find what it is, so we can tell CL about it. I would hate like mad to reinstall Poser over this. I have to have the shadows I've come to rely on. I wonder why no one else is on this? This seems like it could be a huge problem.

Oh! I was not sure either what the heck it is. Shadow casting does seem to terminate unexpectedly and I can't find an exact reason either. It is really escaping me too. I guess another night of experimentation...

I've played around with this problem all night, and I think what is happening is that for some reason shadows do not work properly if you delete lights. I was always using a python script to delete them. Since I opened a file that I may have deleted lights in, I suppose that is why that file didn't render. If I start another file, and delete lights along the way, no shadows.

Yea, got to admit I've had no time to try anything here. I had to get a membership to a gym cuz of my 12 hours per day sitting at the comp. Poser should come with a lifetime membership...LOL! I'm going to check the following things tonight I hope. That cast shadows is turned on for the objects. That maybe a receive shadows option was added and I don't know about it. That would be very cool if an object would not cast shadows, but would receive them. Forgive me if there's a way to do this, and I'm not aware of it. If all else fails I'll rebuild the file in SR4 and see if this helps. Maybe the lights from a pre SR4 file don't work properly. Cheers!

Thanks Katherine! I am blown away by the posted images, and I've been wanting Radiosity and Caustics for a while. I'm off to see the wizard!

Computer assisted work is a new form of art. Expect trouble for about twenty more years.;) I feel that computer assisted work is different enough from other art forms that it must have it's own set of criteria. It borrows from other forms of art. It is similar to drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, cinema, cel-animation, dance, fashion design, collage, etc. (I sure hope I didn't miss anyone!). The criteria for all of these forms of art lend themselves immediately to CG. However the actual practice of creating CG work is not at all very close to how any of these other forms of art are produced. As such, techniques are present in CG that are unique to it. Rendering, for example, (although the word is borrowed), is creating a representation of an object using algorithms based on physical models. Texturing, also linked with rendering, is somewhat unique in that again algorithms are used to simulate the interaction of light with a surface. Postwork, (actually taken from photography), is also partially unique in that it provides an entire category of issues to judge. What does this have to do with Himico's post? I think that CG is so new that we do not yet grasp all of the possible issues that would allow us to be able to judge it. You can judge a render as a painting, but really it is not one, for it was not produced the way that paintings are, and on a monitor, has no real physical presence. Although we can judge it with some of the criteria of painting, there are other criteria that can readily be discussed that are many. Who made the figures? What renderer was used? Since there are questions regarding the creation of the work itself involved, it is only natural that some will set up their own criteria and scoff at others that do not meet that criteria. A co-worker said to me that "CG has in twenty years caused the creation of more bad art than anything ever has". I replied, "Well, the publishers of art history books didn't bother to round up 10,000 years of bad art and print it."

Started with a Portable my dad brought home from work. It had a modem, which back then was a cradle for putting the handset in. There was no screen, it had a thermal tape that printed onto paper like a typewriter. Someone had programmed a D&D type adventure game, and I was hooked. Got a Commodore Vic 20 and hooked it to my TV (It had 4 kilobytes RAM). Had to program anything. I remember magazines would come out with code you could type in. I programmed my own game in BASIC like Zork. Then to Commodore 64, to Amiga, the MAC, and finally to PC. Poser for 3 years. I will be 36 in March. I can only add that I live in Columbus, Ohio, home of The Ohio State University, where Charles Csuri basically invented computer graphics with a 1 million dollar grant from the government. He had played football here and went to war and came back and started doing graphics with punch cards. The grad graphics school is called ACCAD, and Mr. Csuri still works there to this day and you can see some of his original work hanging in the halls there. Some of my instructors for graphics at OSU now work at Pixar, ILM, and Pacific Data Images.