I just loaded in Poser Pro 2012 last night, upgrading from Poser 7.  I love the new preview and other features, but I'm having a problem with a scene I'm creating.

(i7 PC with Nvidia Quadro 3800 and 12 GB ram, Vista Business 64)

Problem One:

I'm using the Gnome House 2 from Renderosity and the lighting setup that comes with the product looks pretty good.  It comes lit with:

Light 1 - Diffuse IBL

Light 2 - Spot (lights the right roof)

Light 3 - Spot (lights the front of the house, I moved this to get more light on the doorway)

Light 4 - Infinite (lights scene from above.  I made this blue as it's a moonlit scene.) 

Everything looks great in preview and it rendered out just as I wanted it.

The probelm came when I wanted to animate the front door opening.  The interior of the house was too dark, so I put a yellow spotlight inside and aimed it at the wall that was visible when the door opened.  I preview it gave a nice, candlelit feel to the interior, but when I rendered it this light was not visible.  The wall remains dark even though it looked correct in preview.  I also tried a point light with the same results.

Am I doing something wrong here?  Does the inside of the house not react to the light in render even though it shows up in preview due to the way it's made ?

 

Problem Two:

Everything else seems to render fine except when I go to render a certain figure (Toon Santa from another site) all I get is a blank screen instead of my render.  When I make it an animation and make a one frame Image movie it spits out a perfect PNG frame.  Why can't I see the render with this figure?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

I tried to duplicate problem with the Gnome house, but could not.

For the interior spotlight, I set position x,z=0 and y=70 cm with -40 xrot, 0 yrot and it appears fine in preview and render.

 

Strange.  I did move the house to the top of a hill, so it is not zeroed out.  I'll try it without moving the house and see what happens.  The weird thing is that the preview looks perfect, but the light doesn't show up in the render.

Figured it out.  The light was not inside the room, but in the annex next to it.  For some reason the preview showed it lighting the wall, but as soon as I moved the light inside the room all was well in the render.  As usual, my bad.