I'm having problems with the V3 hooded cloak from daz3d. Apparently when the hood is pulled forward, light shines through the hood as if there were holes in it. I use poser 5 and tried to render it with both the P4 render engine and the P5 firefly engine. I rendered with one light in the upper left hand corner, as seen in the image. This is an image rendered with 'shadows on' Any ideas??

It's probably the crappy, imprecise way that Poser handles shadow maps. I see this sort of problem with hats, also. Try setting the lights to use raytraced shadows.

but then you won't have soft shadows. raising the hood slightly might help. btw, that's also the reason for the glowing nostrils. poser works on such a tiny scale, that it just can't render shadows of very close things. you'll see the same problem with raytraced shadows also. there's that "bias" thing (light) which effectively tells how far from the object should shadow start (why is this usefull or why not start simply from zero is beyond me). you might try 0.2 or slightly less, possibly you'll get very strange artifacts if you go lower then 0.2.

I get that alot in P4 with hats. One solution is to select the head, create a magnet and reduce the x-,y-, or z-scales of the mag to pull the skull in from intersecting the head covering - you will need to move the zone up, and possibly back, to avoid distorting the visible parts of the head.

yup I get it with anything from hoods to cowls to hiar. I just have decided to paint the shadows in after ward.

Actually, Poser doesn't have a crappy lighting system, it just requires that you know what you are doing. In this case the solution is in adjusting the shadowcam and map size for the light in order to provide the Poser renderer with enough information and detail to properly place shadows when they are close to objects You do not necessarily have to use raytracing just to get better shadows, but you do have to set your shadowcams to be close enough to your subject to grasp the detail and map size appropriate to the size of your final render - also remember that the larger the map size, the sharper the shadow edges will be - if you want soft edges, use a low map size (256 to 512 is generally fine) and be sure your shadowcam is zoomed in close to your subject.

hmm.. what's shadowcam? or do you mind light that casts shadow?