I just went home at lunch and broke out a .pz3 from a render in my gallery.... it is called "Toy Ship". It rendered faster, I'll agree, but there were no shadows and then I checked the render settings, cast shadows was on and the main light had shadows set. They were on for sure in the original file..... I didn't check the dial settings for shadows value 1.0000 now that I think about it, but I am 100% sure the .pz3 was left in the exact settings I used to render the gallery image. P5, SR4, WinXPHome, 850 PIII, 512 meg ram.

I am experiencing the same thing. XP home, 2Ghz w/1G ram I have a spot shining thru a doorway, in sr3 it cast door shaped light, in sr4 the light shines thru the walls. I havent had any time to play with it to see if any settings changed.

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Yea, got to admit I've had no time to try anything here. I had to get a membership to a gym cuz of my 12 hours per day sitting at the comp. Poser should come with a lifetime membership...LOL! I'm going to check the following things tonight I hope. That cast shadows is turned on for the objects. That maybe a receive shadows option was added and I don't know about it. That would be very cool if an object would not cast shadows, but would receive them. Forgive me if there's a way to do this, and I'm not aware of it. If all else fails I'll rebuild the file in SR4 and see if this helps. Maybe the lights from a pre SR4 file don't work properly. Cheers!

I've played around with this problem all night, and I think what is happening is that for some reason shadows do not work properly if you delete lights. I was always using a python script to delete them. Since I opened a file that I may have deleted lights in, I suppose that is why that file didn't render. If I start another file, and delete lights along the way, no shadows.

ok, new report on my new laptop (never had poser on it before) 2.6ghz 512Mb Installed P5 + sr3 figure update + sr4 opened to factory default turned on ground deleted all but one light changed light to spot rendered Shadows work Added Andi3d's CS2 Plot2 building positioned to shine light thru windows don rendered Shadows work Added Andi3d's CS1 Plot1 building positioned to shine light thru doorway onto stairs rendered Shadows work added infinate light rendered No shadows closed P5 put machine into hybranate (went home) opened machine opened P5 rendered default scene shadows work deleted one light rendered shadows work Back to original machine 2.0ghz 1G open to factory default scene render shadows work open previous file 2x M2, 1 V2, 1 Milboy, CS1-Plot1, + clothing and various props. 4 spot lights rendered no shadows open diffrent file don, Milboy, clothing and a few primitaves 3 infinate lites rendered shadows work change one light to spot rendered shadows work thus far I'm confused. I know it seemed to stop working at one point but i can't make repete the process. I know I have one pz3 that shadows don't work in, and others that they do work in.

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Oh! I was not sure either what the heck it is. Shadow casting does seem to terminate unexpectedly and I can't find an exact reason either. It is really escaping me too. I guess another night of experimentation...

I think I may have part of the issue identified, but I need more investigation. Or it may be a separate issue all together.

It appears, for better or worse, that shadows are cast based on the shadow lite cam and not on the light itself.

So look thru your shadow lite cam to see where the shadows will be cast.

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Note the shadows cuts off where the cameral view stops not where the light stops

And these are default settings.

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push the cam back and you can get some shadows that dont match the light.

I'm going to check the shadow lite cams on my scene that won't cast shadows to see if it corrisponds to this.

btw, did it do this in sr3?

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I'm sure that I had no problems in sr3. Dr. Geep once said that sometimes lights have shadow cams and other times do not, don't know the reason... I was starting to suspect that if a light winds up with no shadow cam, maybe now it won't have a shadow, but I have not verified this as I am at work now. I hope we can get it nailed down with a workaround or find what it is, so we can tell CL about it. I would hate like mad to reinstall Poser over this. I have to have the shadows I've come to rely on. I wonder why no one else is on this? This seems like it could be a huge problem.

I suspect that some people may not have run into this problem yet or may not have noticed. Or maybe others do have this problem, but havent said anything because they dont have anything to add.

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Jshoen mentions this in passing in a more recent post. I'm going to say screw it and rollback. I'm waitng til CL gets this fixed. I went to e-mail tech support and I'm at work and don't have my Poser Serial #. I will do it when I get home. Thanks Tyger_purr!

It looks like the shadowcams under firefly are broken.

Try this experiment:
Load Judy, make Ground plane visible, keep default lights, set shadows on in render options
Render
It will now show Judy in a standing position, shadows are correct.
Now, load one of the Female Lying down poses.
Render
It will have the figure lying down but the shadows will be of the first (standing) pose! See picture
Switch to P4 rendermode and the shadows are correct

It looks like the shadowcams caches are not cleared when a new pose is applied

Anyone another explanation?

Just a guess, but perhaps it's related to this fix: "Shadow map memory is now properly freed after calculating each frame." If it was previously effectively using a fresh copy of the "Shadow map memory" each time, then it wouldn't have matter whether it was cleared or not... Now it does.

Ok, I'm not getting this effect myself. I'm going to repeat it and composite the results.

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

I found out that you have to start Poser fresh and repeat the steps to see this behaviour. Sometimes the problem disappears if you change rendering mode, but not always in all scenes. It seems the problems worsens with certain props. In my case with the ground plane in Lore-Naz scene from Daz I cannot get it at all to work. Those shadows remain from a standing figure - even if you load a posed figure which you have saved before. This only happens in firefly

My results. I'm going to suggest you scour your system for old shadow map temporary files that may be interfering with the system.

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

Thanks for the tips!!! I'll try those next time... I haven't had a chance to rollback yet. But I was getting this problem without reposing anything. As you can see Tyger_purr posted an experiment that caused the problem by just adding an infinite light. This seems to be so intermitant it's been a real boggle trying to find just one thing that might be causing it.

Intermittance indicates it is unlikely to be dependent on the program itself. Repeated the above result successfully 15 times, including after reboot, using basic, purchased, and free light sets. I am wholly unable to duplicate it in either Sr3 OR Sr4. It needs to be duplicated successfully and predictably in order to identify the cause and source. Predictably means every time you do X, you will get Y result. bookmarking. I can't get it it to happen, but want to know what it is.

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

I have removed all the shadow tmp files (they were some 500 of them all over the place) and now I get different results
Load Poser, load Judy, Turn on ground, turn on shadows, render in firefly - No Shadows at all
Rebooted the system and tried again - no change, no shadows at all in firefly.
Weirdest thing now is that I cannot get any shadows at all in firefly. Raytrace shadows work fine, but no more depth map shadows.

Since deleting the shadow temp files did make a difference, I decided to restore some of the tmp files I deleted. And restoring "LIGHT1_shadow_0001.tmp" and the ones with similar names for lights 2 and 3 did bring back the old situation: Wrong shadows.
The files which I restored had a date of 20/2/2004, so from before installing SR4.

I am doing a very wild guess now - could it be that SR4 has problems creating a shadowmap temp file because of access rights or some other reason? None of the shadow temp files had a date stamp after the date of installing SR4.

For the record - I am using P5 SR4, Windows XP Pro.
I have checked the settings for the lights in the parameter dials (shadows set to 1.0, Cast shadows on), Ground settings (Cast shadows on), figure (Cast Shadows on), Render Settings Cast Shadows on.
I do not recall having these experiences with SR3

Is there anything else to check?

The shadowmap temp files will block new shaows from being set as they are always creted with the same basic filenames and Poser is set up to use what is already there first. SR4 fixed the bug where they would not be deleted from the drive at the end of a specific frame, which was driving many of us animators bonkers (in my case, it would always lock up on a sequence between 150 and 230 frames depending on the number of shadows). This bug was present in Poser 5 from inception through SR3. What you did not note in your settings was the type of shadow maps you have selected for each of the lights. In my examples above, I used a custom set that has both depth mapped and ray trace shadows at default settings (you can see the marked difference in them). If you managed to get all them ugly temp files (the bane of my P5 existence), then after that it's just a matter of settings. Still watching :)

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

If I delete all the shadow tmp files I do not get any shadows at all in firefly. I use depth map shadows and infinite lights in this example. These are the default lights when you start Poser. Raytraced shadows work fine - I have no problems with those, but I thought these did not use shadow maps. If only a few people have this problem it is likely that it is system dependant - my guess is with the inability to create shadowmaps for whatever reason.

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...?!

Unfortunately no help. The problem occurs with Infinite lights, which have no Distance End. Switching renderer and back does sometimes help, but usually not Any others with the same problem? Please let us know what system you are running on (OS, regional settings, language, or any other setting) to get this pinned down.

I have the same problem with SR4 on Win XP... no shadow tmp files, default lights with firefly work with Depth Map Shadows. Newly created lights do not cast depth map shadows with firefly. I've sent a note to Curious Labs. There is a newer thread that mentions the same problem also.