Congratulations from me, too. :)

"So is there any way to get rid of the squares that the Bucket size produces?" Yes. Set "Minimum displacement bounds" in "Render Options" at least 0.1 higher than your highest displacement value.

Except of using the content room Poser 5 is not trying to connect to the internet. As already mentioned it sends and listens to broadcasts on the local net looking for a copy with the same serial number. If you block Poser in esp. ZoneAlarm it slows down a lot! I did so once and everything (starting/loading/rendering) was a lot slower, maybe because it consumes so much CPU time trying to connect anyway. So IMHO it's a bad advice to block Poser.

Until now I avoided the hair room. Very good and understandable tutorial! Thank you!

"... Judy has very few textures available ..." Judy can wear all Vicky/Vicky 2 textures. (Same UV Map) So there are a lot of textures available.

Late - but finally present...

As already mentioned in another thread: I've had this shadow problem one time after installing sr4. I then switched between firefly/p4 renderer. Rendered. Turned shadows off/on/off. Changed "Dist End" settings to some value and back - and suddenly depthmap shadows in firefly worked. And until now there are no more problems. (Tested with a lot of other old scenes and new scenes) So my guess would be, that somewhere burried is a program flag which didn't get set correctly when updating and because of my "switching" I finally "activated" this flag. (From a programmers point of view this isn't so unusual.) But anyway, this is only wild guessing... ;-)

Big thanks! Your hair is the best IMHO! ;-)

In one scene I had the same problem: No (depth map) shadows at all. What I did: I turned "Dist End" from the affected light to 2. Rendered. Shadows appeared but scene was too dark. Then I turned back "Dist End" to 0 and rendered in Poser4 mode: Shadows correct. Finally switched back to Firefly. Rendered: Shadows now correct! So either it was the "Dist End" thing or the renderer switching. Don't know. Maybe this is some help...?!

present as well.

Turning 41 this year - and feeling quit young after reading this thread... ;-) "My" first computer was an Apple IIc at school, 1983 I bought a C64 with a 'Datasette'. Later came a Floppy drive. I was very proud after writing a basic programm which could rotate a wireframe cube in realtime! Later came an Amiga 2000. "Cinema 4D" on Amiga was my first contact with serious 3d-software. (Used it up until 2000 and out of curiousity managed to load a converted Vicky with it some weeks ago...) Don't remember when I switched to PC. Must been when I started to work as an IT-pro - maybe 15 years ago. Last year I bought Poser 5 after playing with a free P3 magazine version and the free p4 demo for a short time. And now I feel assimilated. Only problem so far: Poser is a "time eater". ;-)

"Zoom Tool" - why didn't I ever think of using it in material room??? Watching....!

After reading this introduction I'm looking forward to some really interesting coming lessons... :-)