Sorry, BB.  Guess I should have been more specific.  I meant it is virtually useless for my purposes.

However, your snide reply did inadvertently provide the solution:  By making the ground invisible, the ground shadow disappeared.

Thank you.

I misunderstood and thought you had just started using Poser.  If you've been using it for years then this is not likely the problem.  Also, this works if your on XP--don't know about Vista or W7.  But if you want to try it anyway:

Right click on the desktop
Click Properties from the menu
Click the Settings tab
Click the Advanced button
Click the Troubleshoot tab
Bump the hardware acceleration slider down a notch. click OK and try to open Poser and see if it works.  If not, bump it down another notch, and so on.

I had the same thing happen when I first installed Poser 6.  The solution was to reduce the hardware acceleration.

It looks like she's about to let rip a tart sarcasm.  If that''s what you were going for, I'd say you succeeded very well.

Try lowpoly's suggestion, except with choreographed group instead of contrained group.  That will force the edge of the square to stay exactly where it's placed.

That bone saw is about a 10 on the wince meter.  And remember, this was from an age before anesthetics.  Ouch.

I've found that converted conforming clothes often include things like buttons and belt loops that fly off into space during cloth simulations.  Generally, they tend to fly away from the figure and cloth item, but in your case, you may have one or two aberrant polies trying to intersect with others.  Unfortunately, they're usually very small and hard to find. 

My suggestion is to run a simple 15 frame simulation in which the cloth crumples to the floor.  Then look for any little "bits" hovering around the cloth item.

Sawman:

Keyframes are specific to objects, so if you set a keyframe for figure 1 it will not automatically appy to figure 2 (or for any props, lights or cameras in the scene).  Are you sure you are setting keyframes for both your figures? 

God bless him.  He was never a big name in Hollywood, but he had a long and fruitful career.  And his association with Harryhausen was probably the best thing that happened for fantasy film fans in the 50's, 60's and 70's.

PaganArtist:

I live in New England, just like you.  In fact, probably < 100 miles from you.  And I see a lot of birds and other animals at my feeder in winter.  They eat and fight, but they don't sing.  They're too busy fighting for survival.  A lot of the cute beasties you see today won't be alive in four months.  That's because winter is also the season for the "dirt mama" to rid herself of the old, sick, and young.

I know I probably sound like the worlds biggest sourpuss right now, but I could really do without the season of white death.

I hate snow.  I hate Winter.  I hate these 5 months of sterile suspended animation, this living death, that nature inflicts each year.  I hate weather that can so readily destroy my life and property if I'm not careful. 

Birds don't sing in Winter, and why would they?  For them, each day is an excruciating  struggle against  a frozen, starving death. 

I love the changing landscape from May to September as things grow and live from day to day.  I love sitting on my porch on a hot July afternoon and seeing God's extraordinary idea-- life--resplendent around me.  I love growing vegetables.   I love being able to go outside without having to wrap myself in protection against the horrible crap that awaits me.   I love the idea that the only proper place for ice is in my gin and tonic.

And my cat agrees.

PaganArtist:
I was lucky. In NE MA the temp climbed high enough on Friday night to turn the freezing rain into plain old rain sometime overnight.  Still, power was out for about 13 hours from Friday 2:00 am to 3:00 pm Saturday.  Luckliy, my wood stove proved its worth.
It's been spotty.  One house has power but across the street they're in the dark.  A friend about 10 miles north hasn't had electricity since Friday.
And the high temp today was 61.  Go figure.

Good luck and stay warm.

Amazing!

I love old "slice of life" photographs.  They can give you real insights into how people lived in the past.  And these hi-res plates have so much detail you can almost walk into them.

Thanks!

Quote - The randomness in lottery machines comes from a whole barrel load of (what are essentially) chaotic effects.

To truely reproduce even a single draw you'd need to account for local changes in air density, air currents, tiny variations of gravity, atomistic scale flaws on all the surfaces of the machine, the balls etc.
The problem is of course you can't because attempting to measure some of these will be in the realm of the Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle.

So while you could simulate a draw, you'll never be able to do so in a predictive way.

I'm sure you're right, and I wasn't suggesting that this would be a practical way to generate random numbers.  I was thinking that maybe the best way to compute randomness would be by trying to simulate the way it occurs in the real world, rather than through calculations that creates a set of differences for their own sake.

I'm not sure why randomness requires an infinite number of possible outcomes.  The leaves that fall from a tree in Autumn do so randomly, but there is a finite number of leaves.