As already stated there is a scene bounding box issue with Infinite Lights using Shadow Maps where at a certain point the light just casts a huge shadow into the scene. I found that this bounding box was approximatly 0.1 PU in size (with the light flat on to the scene). However if I tried to find the exact point the broken shadow would actually creep into the scene. (see attached).

I found that adding in a 2nd item just outside the critical distance (0.11PU) and removing render attributs wouldnt fix the problem. HOWEVER if I kept ALL its shadowing attributes but moved it below the ground plane out of sight the scene then rendered correctly. Not a fix but a simple work arround.

A shadow map is a precalculated lattace or raster that is used to map a shadow into a scene. it can be more efficient than a ray traced shadow (time wise) but at the expence of memory usage. The importand thing to be aware of with a shadow map is that the ammount of allocated memory is split accross the total cone of the light. So the wider the cone or the smaller the map size (memory allowance) the fewer the squares in the raster (note the word squares).

the renderer checks every element in the raster to see if there is geomitry between the light and a surface. if so it then projects that raster element (square) as a shadow into the scene.

If you can see a square then that meant that the raster is too small and it needs more elements to make a more accurate shadow.

in the attached image you can see on the small sphere how the 256k raster projects a single square into the scene and the shadow doesn't get reasonable definition till its using 2Mb. Conversly with the large sphere you can see the lack of definition of the curved edge even at 2mb (the squares are clearly visible).

I hope that sheds some light on things :)

ya, long discussion on exporting from Lightwave on this thread http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2869986

Net result. get LW 11.5.1 or 10.1 or earlyer and export as obj as poser doesnt recognise LWO groupings (parts). make sure you set edit > general options > obj exporter to include "parts" and it will all work out nicely

ZOMG, I dont have the OBJ Parts checkbox in my Options :/ 

then again am only using 11.5 here 

well lets call that partial user error. partial bugged SW

both 32bit LW9.6 and 64bit LW 11.5 LWO's and exported OBJ's load into Poser with surfaces. 

But on larger more complex objects with lots of surfaces Poser gets them muddled up name wise on the LWO (they are all there it just seems to assign the names incorrectly) It gets the OBJ's right though.

As for the parts. they dont seem to be in there as far as the grouping tool is concerned (that is where i would expect to find them, should i be looking someplace else?) for either the LWO or the OBJ. However you could re-make them from the surfaces as they all appear in the add and remove selection buttons. So if you split by surface then your good to go.

I dont think LW is exporting the parts into the OBJ, certainly it isnt reading them if you relaod your obj back into LW. Also Poser isnt reading the LWO parts so between Poser and LW there are no parts. :(

discovered LW 9.6 32bit on my laptop. my part split and surfaced cube come into poser correctly as both an LWO and an OBJ.

i did a load and save of the 9.6 32bit LWO in LW 11.5 64bit to see if there is a difference and now the object is also loading into poser with multiple surfaces :/

sigh gonna try a more complex object in 11.5 and see if that was what was causing it to fail of whether it was user error

i cant get the obj exporter to recognise parts or surfs from modo 701 (64bit). i set surfs and parts then hit save as wavefront obj and it says this format only suports geometry and simple surfacing and in poser  all i have is a single element with a single material. :/

i have LW 9.6 -> 11.5 (all 64bit which may make a difference) and none of the obj exports have more than 1 part or surf

just tried in modo 701. its obj exporter also seems to be very basic. it took a layerd object and dumped the surface assignments and layers into a single mesh and surface :(

its looking more and more like the only app thats going to export an obj with parts is maya (i dont have max and xsi licenece has run out so i cant check that)

ya, Lightwaves obj exporter is very basic. i dont think it has advanced since it was first included way back in the 1990's. It only holds a single mesh (from the 1st layer only) and it will drop the parts and surfaces which is somewhat useless :(

poly groups in Lightwave are a selection set used within Lightwave they arnt nessisarly understood or used by other bits of software (consider them like meta data in your mp3s).

they can be saved into a LWO just like surfaces or other data sets like morpsh or point groups. However it seems that the Poser LWO importer is ignoring the data sets stored within the LWO such as surfaces, groups, uv's weightmaps and morphs. It doesnt even seem to understand layers and just welds them all together into a single mesh.

The only way i have manged to get seperate parts into Poser via Lightwave at present is to split the LWO in modeler (with for example "surfaces to parts") and then put each part onto a seperate layer and export the object as a Collada. This I import into poser and it will create a seperate prop for each part.

Quite what you would do with those bits after that I am not sure. 

There has to be a better solution. Perhaps when the new poser fusion plugins arrive the workflow will be more friendly.

Thanks for the replies guys (and gals). you've given me a lot to think about.

I had planed on using poser to make a multi media comic strip (images and animations). My setting is going to be a fantasy realm (trolls, dragons, orcs, elves (not the slutty sort) magic and monsters etc etc).

Primarily I'm going to need 3 male and 3 female human characters (+ horses) to start with. Over time (assuming I keep rolling) that will expand to 6 male and females with 4 dark trolls and 3 elves and an assortment of monsters; goat men, scorpion men, cave trolls, humans (Romans), basilisks demons, vampires, zombies etc etc

The backgrounds and sets I think will probably have to be rendered in a different app. I had thought Lightwave. I want good quality forests, city’s, caves and ruins and to be honest I haven’t seen anything in the shop along those lines that I like so I think I am probably going to have to make those. 

Having trawled the store for medieval weapons I found the content on that front a little light on the ground. There isn't enough varity. I can see I'm going to have to make all that sort of stuff too.

I'm going to try and adapt existing clothing to fit my genera or make my own. The armours and clothing I want are fairly specific and need to be grounded in reality. I am thinking Greek, Roman and Persian as a base to work from.

I think I have worked out what NVITWAS stands for and I don’t plan on featuring any of them though there may be an occasional SCVITWAS! After all every female warrior needs at least 1 good quality chain mail bikini. ;)

Thanks

Quote - Nyaid it's very hard to see your sample images so some this might be off because I might think I'm seeing something that isn't there. I know it's hard to ger hair guides to show up.

I'm not having these problems in my latest copy of poser. I'm assuming that is what you are using, correct? Are you having the problem all the time or just sometimes?

First, I'd say that poser isn't rendering the hair guides, that is the actual strands. If the hair density is low enough, the only hairs you see will be in the spots where the guides are.

Second in the first image I am seeing 6 guides in the polygon where there should be only 4. Do you have the show populated checked? If not there is something wrong with the hair and you might need to start over.

When you change the hair density does the number in parenthesis change at all? I have found that sometimes depending on the geometry I have to put an astronomical number in there to get any strands. I have also found that sometimes when I delete either the skullcap or the hair group and then undo that I lose all density and cannot raise it no matter what number I put in there. To my knowledge there is no fix for this. You need to start over with that group. I have not been able to duplicate this problem in pp2014 so I can't say that is the problem. Also I think you might get this problem in older versions if you try saving a hair group with out the skullcap(or other object the hair might be grown on).

If it's with all hair, you might have a corrupted hair room and may need to reinstall poser or contact SM. Good luck.

Hi thanks for the reply.

try this, in pp2014 open a new scene. select the ground object and make a hair group of 1 poly. hit the grow guide hairs (poser gives us 4 guide strands one on each of the polly's verts, as expected). select style hairs and set density to 0 (or what poser gives 0.15 in my case) and enable 'show populated' and you will see 6 strands like in 1st image. 4 guide hairs and a couple of strands poser creates on the polly. Hit render (firefly final render type not a preview) and all 6 of them render!

2 of them have been spawned in the poly like might be expected (if i had wanted some hair and set something other than 0) the other 4 of them ie the ones on the verts in the corner of the the poly are guide hairs, these shouldnt render at all.... 

isnt hair suposed to be spawned randomly on the selected group? not on every vert of every selected poly.

if you have a dense mesh for spawning on and poser renders all the guide strands on all the verts it makes it neigh on impossible to have a spase population of hair without manually selecting 3 out of 4 guides and scaling them to 0 or pushing them through the mesh out of the way. and even this cludge of a work around will still leave you with the minimu possible number of hairs = to the total number of polys in your group. That to my mind is a bug.

anyone else see 6 strands renderd on a single poly?

Let me qualify the Hair density issue. I havent given enough detail.

What poser does when you make hair is to "grow" its guide hairs on the corners (verts) of a selected poly. Which is fine and good. If you have a dense mesh then it grows a lot of guide hairs which should give you a lot of control.

The density control seems to be area based which is good as the density is affected  the surface area of the polys (of your selection). 

HOWEVER what poser does that is truly horrible is it actually renders its guide hairs!!!! no no no no no... do not do this. this automatically gives 4 hairs per poly irrispective of the desired density. 

Why? because if i want to make a sparse hair density on a surface the only way to do it would be to have 1 single poly for the entire surface and even if that were practically possible (which it totaly isnt) im still left with a hair in each corner!

The only way i can see to get down to just a single hair is to scale back all the guides except 1. This is hardly ideal as that hair is going to be on a vert and not in the poly. This makes softening the edge of a wig a bit of a pain particulally on a dense mesh. Im going to end up with a line of hairs on the verts following the loops in my topology.

Fix please! dont render the guides

I am having issues getting hair density to work (at all in 2014) i get the same number of folicals rendered whether i set hair density to 0 or to 100000