Rather than comment on this each time I notice it in a gallery image, I thought I would address in the forum a common flaw I have recently been noticing a lot in the work of others as well as my own, and ask if others have found solutions: When a figure touches its own body, or the body of another figure, it often times does not look like firm contact is made. I think it has something to do with the lack of shadow (a shadow that should be a lot more subtle than shadow cast on a floor or wall), and perhaps the way that the surface doesn't "yield" to the pressure. Have others noticed, and created fixes for this?

I think it's to do with the way that the skin doesn't deform. This also applies when sitting on hard surfaces, for example. Looking forward to Dynamic Flesh(tm) in Poser 6. :D Possible solutions include magnets, postwork, and a combination of the two.

I notice it all the time and usually take the easy way out by correcting with a bit of burn and darken in Photoshop :)

Gill

       

It's also to do with the way the Poser render engine handles shadows. Badly, in other words. I wouldn't have had the problem in my last pic if I'd used Firefly but Poser choked on the render. I forgot to postwork it out when I posted the image.

Coppula eam se non posit acceptera jocularum.

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Contact shadows - well, it's just the default settings of Poser's shadows. IMHO, the shadow bias is too high. Often, I reduce it to 0.2, sometimes 0.1. As always, adjusting the shadow lite cams will improve things a lot too.

Here's an example. First, default settings for the key light. Yuck.

Easy way out: Switch it to raytraced shadows.

Lower bias on the key light, shadow cam adjusted, higher shadow blur - no increase in shadow map size).

Higher map size of the key light, shadows turned on for the fill light (ignore the shading error on the other thigh, that's a differnt problem).

There's all my suffering in a nutshell! Learned that using the 3000 practice render technique. do not recommend it...Thanks Stewer!

the reason this shadow doesn't show up right in Poser is that the chief source of the effect is what's called "ambient occlusion" -- that is, the blocking of the general ambient light as your hand approaches, say, the thigh. In order to have ambient occlusion, though, you need to have a Global Illumination solution, or fake it, either with many lights, or with the --very clever!-- settings above