System Specs: WindowsXP Professional, Amd Xp2400 processor, 1.5Gigs DDR333 Cas2. Nvidia GeForce Ti 4600, Soundblaster Audigy, All with latest drivers etc. Poser5 is on its own 80Gig drive

Settings: Lightmaps at 5000, Production Render, Shadows on, Raytracing on, Smooth polygons on, Remove backfacing polygons on, Use texture filtering on, Depth of Field off, Motion blur off, all other settings at default.

I include example picture showing the same render and settings, done first with just P5 and then with P5 Sr3.

Any idea what is happening? Anyone? (look at the glasses. This seems to happen with props and clothing especially.)

Have you checked the area covered by the shadowcam for the shadow-casting lights? You really don't need a map size of 5000 if you zoom the camera in close to your subject. A map size of 500 to 1000 is more than sufficient unless you are making huge final renders. Also these grainy shadows can be due to the shadow min bias on the light set too high. Try lowering the value to 0.5 or 0.4.

Are the lights set to raytrace shadows seing as you are using raytracing? If so, adjust the minimum shadow bias to something like 0.2 and the shadows should form properly. Well, that cured it for me when I got that dappled effect. It happened to me in SR2.1 too. If you are raytracing, shadow map size has no bearing on the final shadow. You will still get sharp edges if you don't touch the shadowmap dial.

Both Ronstuff, and Raven, Thank you for answering! And both of you were right, it seems to be the bias settings. Changing them down to 0.3 solved the problem. Thanks again for your help: I was really stumped, and P5 would have been useless to me with shadows like that! :-) On a related problem o.8 seems to be the default bias setting for me. Is there any way to change these defaults without having to do it to each lightset one by one by hand?

Not sure if this will work in P5, but try using the Edit Menu --> Memorize --> Lights feature, then set this as your Preferred State in General Preferences.

Thanks Little Dragon, I will try that now. :-)

Ockham issued a great python script for changing settings of multiple lights all at once. Do a search for "ockham" in the free stuff and get "Python: Change lights, P5 and P4". This gives you a panel where all the ligths parameters can be altered (min shadow bias for instance), and the alteration can be spread to all the lights in a single click (check the "apply to all lights" radio button). As I like to use complex lightings, I use it a lot. Hope this helps.