Worth a try. I've done that before, but it's been years. I know there were instructions on doing it, which files to delete, etc. on Poser's website. Have to see if I can find that. The Parameters/Properties Palette has now locked up for the third time today and this needs to stop.

I have an animation using V3 and wondered if I could turn it into an Animation Sequence and apply that to V4.  Anyone tried that?  Any tips?

Gromit

Forget it.  I figured out that the problem is due to the fundamentalist firewall here in Saudi Arabia that has classified Aery Soul's site as a sex site.  Since the pictures in the Marketplace page are being served up from there it is blocking them as well.

Gromit

Looks like the problem is solved. It turned out that the common link I missed in all of the instances was the creation of new lights. Any new light I created was not able to cast depth-mapped shadows. And that, it turns out, goes back to a problem in one of the earlier service packs. I thought mine were up-to-date but found out that I was one behind, all because of a disk crash I had a few months back and subsequent rebuild. I failed to pick up the newest service pack when I reinstalled Poser. So the solution was to install the latest service pack, delete all lights in the scene and re-create them.

Actually this gets more and more mysterious. I finally called Curious Labs Technical Support about this because I have a scene I spent quite a bit of time on and don't want to have to redo. As I mentioned in my previous post above, whatever the problem is, it propagates through the light set I created, so any PZ3 I insert that into has the same characteristics - no depth-mapped shadows. If I delete the lights, either by clicking them one-by-one or using a Python script I have, and then create a new light, it also won't cast depth-mapped shadows. Now here's where it really gets even stranger: If I save the figures from that scene, exit Poser completely, start it again with an empty scene and insert the figures I saved, the problem is back. No shadows. I went so far as to run a comparison between the CR2s of one of the figures I saved - a Don with hair - with its original CR2 using MS Word's Merge and Compare feature (a 7,000 page document gasp). I can't see what's causing this unless it has to do with the internal figure number itself, which gets changed to 10. The rest of the differences look to be all shader nodes and such, although there is an "auto-fit" block of data that is repeated several times. I'm not sure what that is. I'm going to send copies of the test PZ3 and LT2 to the technical support people today and let them have a look. I know, it's probably something really dumb that I did myself but thus far I haven't been able to track it down.

Yes, I believe so. Version number is 5.0.4.321. I have found that the problem seems to be in the light set I am using. I created that set in another scene, saved it and then used it in the current scene which is where I'm having the problem. If I use that light set in my test scene with Don and Judy only, I also see the problem of no shadows. If I open a new scene and create the shadow light from scratch, the shadows look ok. However, it doesn't work to just delete the lights and recreate them. Whatever the problem is, it just keeps coming back when you do that. It must be some parameter in the light set definition that persists even after all the lights are deleted.

After reading a bit more about Injection PoseBuilder it looks to me like that's the way to accomplish what I want. I haven't tried it yet but there is an option there to delete morphs with zero values. So it ought to be possible to take a figure that has all morphs injected but only some of them used, create an injection pose, and then apply that to a basic V3, for example, to create the same character with only the minimum required injection morphs. That's what I'm after. Gromit

Maybe that's what it was. I'll have to go back to the DAZ site and read up on it. Gromit

I've already learned about two things I didn't know. I'll have to get more into making conforming clothing, which I've been avoiding for years. I've also encountered that gymbal lock effect but didn't understand just what was happening.

Well, so far no luck. I tried the alternate diffuse color thing and also the displacement fix, but I still get the same results. I'll keep playing around with this but if anyone has an idea what to do I'd appreciate it. Gromit

One of them is the sky dome in HMann's 3d Worlds. It looks fine until you render, then there's nothing there but black. It is a prop, but I didn't import it. Same thing with the other objects, they are all part of a castle construction set, pieces of wall and gates. Gromit

This is great! I'm one of those who had not seen this before. It explains some things I really didn't follow about light/object color interaction among other things. Thanks for posting this. Gromit

Maybe you misspelled the URL, I just downloaded demos of Deep Paint and several other programs from there a few days ago.

Thanks for the info. I'll check it out. Gromit

Ok, I made several tests, raising the bucket size first to 64 then to 128. I couldn't see any difference in the render times or in the processor/memory usage. I then tried increasing the render size from 320x240 to 640x480, keeping the bucket size at 128. As hard as it was for me to believe, the render time was still almost exactly the same, but the processor usage increased to about 60% and the memory usage went up by maybe 30Mb. Evidently this particular animation is so trivial that it's hitting some kind of fixed overhead of the renderer that has a much greater influence than the actual computation involved. I could probably render the same number of empty frames in essentially the same length of time. Gromit