I used a prop floor from the free stuff and I cannot for the life of me get shadows to appear on the floor - I tried making the ground plane invisible and nuthin- I can not remember how to get the durn shadows to appear - I do not want to use a shadow catcher if I do not need to- HELP- oh yeah -poser 7

Do you have a figure in you scene? I remember something vague about poser's inability to render prop shadows if there is no figure in the scene, even if the figure is invisible. Michal

yep 2 of them

1> Turn Shadows on for the Light that you want castin Shadows
2> Turn on Cast Shadows under the parameter window of the object you want a shadow of
3> Turn on Cast Shadows under your Render Settings
4> Aim Shadow casting light at Shadow making object and render.

Or - just put a material on the GROUND prop included by default.

pjx 99 - will that work with the ground plane under the prop- or do I set it to invisible?

You folks got me interested in this so I tried it with a ground plane and a sphere resting on it.  When I set the sphere to invisible, no shadow even with shadow activated.  MatrixWorks' steps work.  However, one more  thing you can check is the shadow intensity of your lighting .  

IIf the shadows are set too low the shadows won't show well.  eg a setting of decimal 2 (.2) will give an extremely faint shadow while a setting of one (1 ) gives you pure black.  Try eliminating all lights except one. Set the intensity of the shadow to one (1) in the lighting controls and see if you got the shadow, then reduce the intensity to your taste.  I have Poser 5 and it works just fine-Plutom

Maybe older versions work different, I dunno ^_^

If you use a prop for the floor it seems to cause this problem - are you putting a simple material on the ground plane? if so this is not the problem - try putting the shere on a imported floor prop and see if it works