I almost hate to open this discussion, but I'm having trouble with water under IDL. I will post two examples for you. I've had this happen with two projects and it's really aggravating me to no end. The first example is IDL render and the water plane is turned on to ray trace. The whole image took a total of 6 freaking hours to render. The second image, I turned ray trace off on the water plane and it looks more like I wanted but not quite and only took over an hour.  The images are cropped because my girl is practically nude.

And the second image.

 Not sure what the problem is but I suppose it's the fact that the top one is too dark. Isn'tt hat the same thing as the glass problem where it casts a shadow eventhough it shouldn't, because Poserr's transparency thing doesn't work properly in all cases? I think it was Miss Nancy who showed a pic of a glass plane where it was also shadowed underneath.

What happens if you turn off Cast Shadows for the water plane and keep the raytracing?

I do have cast shadows turned off on the water plane.  So I don't know what's going on here.

when you turned raytracing of then the plane ignored IDL but it didnt ignore the reflections.

so it looks very close to real watter. it had reflection and it lets light go through.

where is the problem?

Cast shadows has to do with directional lighting.

IDL occlusion/colorbleeding is not a shadow in the traditional CG sense - it is measuring the light bouncing off nearby surfaces. If something is lit from the other side and occludes a surface, then it seems to cast a soft shadow but that's not a "shadow", in sense that we're talking about the part of the software that looks at a spotlight and decides not to use it.

A water plane looks like a black surface to IDL. IDL is Indirect Diffuse Lighting. It is an approximation - a cheat - a handy workaround. It is not a complete lighting model - it is not an "unbiased" rendering solution.

When you are dealing with IDL you must only expect it to work right where the diffuse contribution of secondary lighting is almost the whole contribution.

If in a given scenario reflection or refraction is a dominant factor in how things are lit by and through each other, then IDL is a terrible, almost useless mechanism for handling global illumination.

In such cases, you either have to make all sorts of hacks and cheats and adjustments, or you stop using Firefly and use an unbiased renderer, or you use a biased renderer that has more hacks, cheats, and approximations built in.

Note that an unbiased underwater lighting solution will generally run much more than 6 hours - quite likely 20 hours to 100 hours.

Biased renderers make assumptions about what is not important and can be skipped. We use them to save time. When those assumptions or biases are incorrect, you get wrong results.

IMO, the water plane should render properly with ray trace enabled. When you make it invisible to ray trace, it does render, but doesn't look as good as it would if rendered WITH ray trace turned on and IDL turned off (basically a Poser Pro render).

IMVHO water #2 looks o.k.
maybe add some fake caustics on the legs, pool bottom and sides to snazz it up.

Sorry, had to run to the grocery store.  I'm not sure how to do caustics. Could someone kindly explain?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2741994&ebot_calc_page#message_2741994

see att lnk fr bill's technique in one case.

you the settings from teh second render. and go in the material room and make the reflection for 12 % lower . that way the watter will be darekr and it will ignore the IDL.

perfect results for poser.