Miss Nancy...

Ahhh....  The Blur Radius as a factor.  That makes sense.  I'll have to try that.

Thanks.

Thanks for your responses.

I've got a confirmation from Smith Micro that Firefly does not handle depth maps on small objects.  If you put two small objects in the scene, unless they are very close, then it works.  It seems to be the target area that Firefly tries to map that matters.  Two objects makes the map area larger.

In the default light set up the threshold seems to be about 8 1/2 inches.  And this is with Infinite Lights.  Change to Spots and the object renders fine.  I haven't tried to move the spots way out to see if distance is a factor.

You can test this by using Poser primitives like the Hi-Res Ball.  It loads at about 10 inches so if you scale it down to 60% you wind up with bad shadow map.  Scale it back up to 100% and it renders fine.  Also, use two spheres, scale them way down, 10-20%, put them close together and the shadow map is bad.  Move them apart far enough and they render OK.

For practical purposes, it really doesn't matter much.  How often does anyone want a render of one small object?  I was just making a temp thumbnail for a prop for my library when I stumbled across this limitation and panicked.  Now that I know it isn't my mesh that's the problem I'll just work around it.

Thanks again everyone.

Miss Nancy...

I was testing objects from Poser and another program also, but they were just a little bit bigger so they worked and absolutely confused me...  Just a couple of inches.   If I had made them the same size I might have caught on sooner but I figure the difference between 7 and 10 inches wasn't going to matter.  Hah!  I'll know better in the future.

I'm glad it has nothing to do with Carrara.  There are certain models I love building in it.

Thanks again.

FrankT...    I scaled it up even more and everything cleared up.  Yeah, it's a scaling issue.

The render above is off because I forgot to clear the saved depth map.

I tested some more and an object alone that is smaller than around 8.5 inches, about 12% of Std Fig, in size has trouble with depth maps.  Ray tracing works fine on the small objects though.

Thanks Frank.

And thanks everyone for your help.

Miss Nancy...  What version of Carrara are you using?  7 Pro?

Thanks again both of you.

One more note...

The problem occurs in Depth Map Shading,  When I change a light to Ray Trace that shadow is fine.

Miss Nancy...  I just tried your method using only the Assembly room (not taking it into the vertex model room) and have the same result.  Comparing the 2 object files, the one straight from the Assembly room seems to have some jusnk in it and the one from the model room seems cleaner.

I bought Carrara 7 Pro in early March.  I check with DAZ to see if I'm missing an update or have one that has problems.

Other than the scaling , the only other big difference between Carrara and Poser is that you have convert the z-axis in Carrara to y-axiz in Poser.  But the meshes look fine.  ???

Thanks for your help.

One light seems to pick up the color and casts a proper shadow and the other is going black and casts a square shadow.

I'm confused!!

LukeA...  Nope.  Remove backfacing polys didn't do it.

I'm going to pull it into UV Mapper and check it out to see if there is anything wierd. 

Thanks.

Ockham...  No luck.  I tried both importing with flip normals on, flipping the normals in the group editor, and stripping the normals out of the OBJ file.  Same result.

Also the example with the 2 cylinders is exactly the same as the first which rendered black except for having two of the same object.

There seems to be something about the single object mesh that I exported from Carrara that is puzzling Firefly.  I've stripped the meshes down to the basics and still get this result.  The only difference I'm seeing is the scaling between the two programs, and I've tried scaling it down before exporting and scaling on importing all with the same result.

Any other ideas?

Thanks!!

OK.  That makes sense to me.  Thanks Phil.

(Though I'm still a little cynical about why they applied them to the breasts and made them bigger. lol)

Anyway, I'll read up on deformers so I understand all tem better.

OK, I get it now.  The Dev is a cr2 file with no deformation of the mesh while the default Sydney or Jessi has deformers in the cr2 or linked pmd files.  Something like that.

It just seems strange to me that there are magnets on the default characters.  I'd think that they should be left for the end user to apply.  I kind of get the impression that the modeler finished the mesh and some guy in marketing thought that the girls would sell better with bigger breasts so they threw some magnets on.

Oh well, I guess you always have to apply the deformers to conforming clothes.

Thanks for all of your help.

OK.  I added Sydney's deformers to the TShirt and it worked. 

So I take it that the TShirt was designed on the Dev version even though it will most likely be used on the regular version.  Is there a reason to design it for the Dev and not the version with the magnets applied?

Thanks for your help.