I remember a smart weather prop from the freestuff.  It was a simple plane, but had the property of always facing the camera.  I was never sure how this was done.  I did find though, that I could reposition and scale it so that it could be used as a background object.  It seems like maybe if the object could be reparented, but still always face the camera, it would be a great way to make useful billboards.  I'd love to see this work, as then they could be clustered to a tree trunk object...  The possibilities would be endless.

Ohhhh...  So using unique names for the lights minimises the problem?

No, radiosity and global illumination are two different things.  GI simulates the indirect light from atmosphereic scattering, or ambient light.  Radiosity lets the colours and lighting properties of one object in the environment affect another.  Faking one isn't exactly faking both.

It's really a learning curve thing.  Poser is super easy to start off with, compared to something like blender or Maya.  You'd have to work with blender for months to be able to do the same render you could do your first time in Poser in a few minutes, and that is assuming you have a high quality character rig ready to go in blender.  However, those months you spend actually learning the modeling and rigging in the other program will be a nice foundation for you to continue with.  At some point, alot of Poser users hit a brick wall.  They can make renders that only look so good, but taking it a step further can be really difficult.  When you get tired of the included content, or buying content, and decide to make your own figures and props you will see what Poser's problems really are.  By then you will probably be to spoiled to learn the hard program from scratch, and you will go through hell trying to get anything you had in Poser into that other program, with notable exceptions.     

So, maybe I should hold off on SR1?  That's OK, as the only problem I've ever had with P7 is the one where it disappears in an instant.  Did that even get fixed?

Thanks!  I think I'm really about to give it a try.  There are just so many powerful features in there and the price is nice, too! 

It's the reliance on the keyboard that put me off.  I used to use Caligari on the Amiga and wouldn't touch the keyboard for days, as once a file was named I could just click it to save and leave the keyboard on the floor (where I think it belongs when using a GUI based OS).  I like a gadget or slider for everything, when possible.  Good thing is that I wouldn't have to unlearn very much since the only key commands I have in memory are Wings'.

Thanks for the explanation of adding a cube.  This cube will render, right?  I remember reading the manual (it's been about 5 years) and thinking that I had to create an object before specifying the mesh as the mesh can't exist by itself and the object has no mesh until one is linked to it.  Or maybe I just wanted to think it was difficult...

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Hey, with Blender, most days I feel lucky if I remember how to add a cube to the scene.

That's encouraging...  I've been thinking of trying blender since forever, but I always get scared away by how difficult it's said to be.  Just out of curiosity, how many menus, key presses and mouse motions does it take to add a cube in blender?

I haven't had any DOF related crashes that I know of.  I definitely think it's an improvement over P6...

There was a thread covering this about two weeks ago.

But unfortunately, Poser uses the term "smoothing" in the render settings panel to refer to subdivision.  Vertices actually are added at rendertime, so a sphere's edges will appear much more round with smoothing on than off.  It's something that's easy to overlook as you never see the added detail in wireframe.

Crease angle was a godesend when I was doing low poly "mecha" in Caligari on the Amiga.  I could set each individual piece's smoothing threshold.  The end result being that I could achieve apparently smooth pieces with low poly counts, and still have a few hard edges so as to avoid the "pillow effect".  (I think that's actually the correct term, BTW)

That looks much better.  My easy suggestion for terrain: magnets.  Select your ground prop, and add a few magnets, taking care to use various sizes for the influence zones.  Then you can pull and sculpt the ground to your liking and create a morph target when you're done.  It's nice to see all of the suggestions coming together in a much improved image!

So smoothing is dependent on crease-angle?  I hadn't noticed that, I'd just assumed that crease angle only affected the shading while smoothing creates actual geometry at rendertime.  

There once was a 3D program called Tornado for the Amiga that let you set smoothing values.  You could make a sphere look like a blackberry by setting the smooth value to 150%.  I miss several things from that program.

If you are using Poser 7, try playing with the morph tool.  It's possible to pull the clothing mesh so that it covers the figure mesh.  Try a large radius brush, but with a low magnitude.  Be careful as you pull the mesh not to mouse over the mesh you are trying to hide as this will select it.  Also, don't always use the "pull to surface" as the mesh can bulge in ways that aren't apparent as you work.  "Pull to screen" is easier to judge, but sometimes seems to work backward from the direction you are pulling.  Likely you will end up with custom morphs for several parts of your figure.  You may want to create proper morphs targets and name them as e.g. "fit" so that you can still use the morph tool later on these pieces.  Also, I find that the smooth tool works well for touching up the areas where the pieces join.  I hope in a future version we are able to morph multiple, at least two, joined pieces simultaneously. 

Just wanted to say that that was indeed the problem.  It's quite easy to select from the list, for example, the main camera while you are still using the face camera.  So, you can see the crosshairs from one camera as you use a different one, and yes, it looks pretty weird.  Is it just me or didn't selecting a camera from the list make that the active camera in previous versions?