I'm creating a scene inside of Stonemasons "The Ministry", and I'm having real problems with lighting it. I'm using infinite lights, and they work fine in preview (and the preview renderer), but all the color is leached out (I'm using mostly red lights), and things are much darker in the Firefly renderer. I've an inkling that it might be because the walls (and floor) of the Ministry are blocking the infinite lights (except the white light from above, which can come through the skylights), but In the past if I've had a light behind a prop wall in is blocked in the preview window as well. Odd, that. Any advice?

Quote - I'm using infinite lights ...

That's your problem.  Infinite lights really should only be used to simulate sunlight or moonlight, as they're pretty unrealistic for interior lighting - interior light from a lightbulb e.g. will spread,while Infinite lights are "coherent" like sunlight and don't spread.  You can also get some wierd effects if you have shadows turned off for that light - but if you turn on shadows, frequently the light will not work very well at all, because interior walls will block it.  That is probably why your render is so dark - the preview isn't showing you the way the shadows, while the render is.

Seriously consider using a set of spotlights or point lights for interior lighting.  It would be nice if Poser could do surface lighting reasonably well, but in my (limited, noobish) experience that is very hard to simulate in Poser, so if you need to show something like a set of fluorescent lights, you'll have to cheat (a string of low power spotlights with wide shadow spread so they don't appear to cast multiple shadows).

edit: to be honest though, I sometimes cheat and use a very low power Infinite light to fill in spaces that render out to be too dark ;)

Another hint: using ray-traced shadows on the lights, and ray-tracing
in the render, will give you much more realistic light-blocking for
things like windows and skylights.

And don't forget that a wall doesn't have to cast a shadow. If you turn off "Cast Shadows" on a prop then it doesn't block the light any more. When working with "interior" sets, sometimes this is just easier, so you can use infinite lights and not have to worry about placing the actual light source inside the tiny room, which is a pain in my book.

I was having the same problem, but bagginsbill's solution did the trick -- turning off the "Cast Shadows" for the prop.

That's a good trick that I hadn't thought about - I guess it relies on the model allowing you to do that though, e.g. if it's a large one-piece figure you could do that for one "bodypart" at a time, which might not allow one to make a specific wall invisible.  Although I suppose you could get the same effect by using the Group Editor and grabbing all of the vertices on that wall, and then giving them a material group and making the material group transparent.

here's a light set I made for Poser6,these are the same lights used in the promotional renders

Cheers
Stefan

http://home.xtra.co.nz/hosts/polycount3d/MinistryP6LIGHT.ZIP