You'll see attached...nothing. Vampi should be in the spotlight of course :-) Parameters are on the right. To compare... (cntd.)

&S

...the scene unrendered. What's happening? (Befor you ask, the render is on "4": 1 raytrace.)

a) The spot prop blocks the light. Extremely unprobable since they aren't
even at the same place.
b) My 128+512 Mb DDR Ram aren't sufficient for anything more complicated
since even in normal use Poser 6 is a memory hog.
c) The installation is damaged
d) None of the above?

Heeeelp! Or I have to render the Big Vampi&Pendragon Magic Show
with a point light. That still works.

&S

One thing I notice: the spot is coming from behind the girl.
So the rendered picture makes sense to my eyes ... her
front side is not really illuminated.

Especially with spotlights, the preview is not a good predictor
of the real picture. 

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With those settings, there should be a bright yellow spotlight 3units behind Vampi and about 6.7units up, pointing more or less down at her - I checked this in a blank scene and it all looked okay. Are you sure the back screen is not blocking it all out (sorry, obvious question). I don't know what measurement units you are using.

"If I were a shadow, I know I wouldn't like to be half of what I should be."
Mr Otsuka, the old black tomcat in Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

the top render looks o.k. to me for a poser 4 render.  maybe touch it up in PSP if it's critical
to have it look right, or use carrara or some real renderer.

obviously there were many problems with poser 4 rendering engine and the way it calculated
backlites, shadowmaps et al.  e.g. poser 4 calculated the additive shadow wrong in cases
like this, where there were opposing back and front lites.  there is a recent post in this forum
about said bug.  adjusting the backlite shadowmap size and zooming in on the backlite
shadowcam wouldn't work in this case AFAIK.  and that's why folks used spots in poser 4 -
so they could avoid zooming in on the shadowcam (little-known feature of poser 4).

Quote - the top render looks o.k. to me for a poser 4 render. 

But isn't it a firefly render in poser 6?

shokoshu, I assume the problem is you wanted the spotlight to change the surface color from red to yellow. try increasing the intensity above 200% eventually it will breakthrough

THX to all who replied. Obviously whatever issues I might have *additionally*, the rendered scene (Ockham, you're right, most of the spot is wasted on her pretty backside :-) ...

doesn't look at all like the preview.

But as I constantly say, one minute of cheating (with PSP3) weighs one hour of swearing (when desperately fumbling with the dials).

Here you see my final scene (not great art, but approximately how
I wanted it to come out). I moved the spot to double height and
directly over Vampi and faked around with the spot prop. Of course,
this spot can't show these lighting effects, but after all,
you'll never know what lights are outside the visible scene :-)

&S