Ok, so I've gotten to a point that I'm fed up with the crap, I can't seem to get Poser to render shadows.

Here's a simple version of the problem, I set up two infinite lights, both with depth map shadows, set render settings to high, Poser only renders one of the depth map shadows.  I could have global lights and it will still only render one of them... sometimes it won't render them at all.

What is going on?

Poser has become self aware and is trying to protect you from rendering useless shadows, by forcing you to switch to Ray Traced.

I do raytraced on some images, but I also want soft shadows, something I can't get from raytraced

I do raytraced on some images, but I also want soft shadows, something I can't get from raytraced

Huh? I get perfect soft shadows with ray tracing, you just have to change the blur radius in the light properties.

Depth mapped shadows seem to be working fine for me in PP2012 SR2.1 (see attached image), and I don't remember any problem in previous versions. Which version of Poser are you using? Check that 'Shadows' are enabled for both lights in their Properties.

woof, that's why I don't like raytrace, they shadows look so nasty, bleh

It really confuses people when you advertise your own confusion as a thoughtful and informed opinion.

There is a setting called shadow samples - use it.

I'm with BB.

my advise / guideline is to keep the blur radius : samples = 1 : 10 ratio. So radius = 8 means samples = 80. One of my fav's is: radius  = 20, samples = 200. To keep the same quality level.

For large print: double / quadruple the samples on top of that. Poster size render (7000x5000), radius = 20, then samples = 600 or so.

the advantage to ray-traced shadows is that they're realistic.  the advantage to depth-map is that they are faster to calculate in some cases, hence they're physically wrong, as seen in poser 4.  so many people complained about depth-map shadows that now we've got a poser product that is vastly improved over poser 4.

Yep, this can best be seen when using displacement or polygon smoothing (here on a cube), which makes the object appear smoother. But of course the cube is not really made smooth (the cube does not actually change shape), it is rather an illusion by the renderer. As it can be seen, the naive depth map shadows erroneously use the smoothed object for shadows (left), while the raytrace shadows do not fall for such cheap tricks, and correctly use the blocky, "real" cube, hence more realistic (right).

:-)

If a want a smooth object using Posers Smoothing option, I want Smooted shadows.

If I want a "hard" cube, I will not use smoothing, and get "hard" shadows.

Dephmapped is the way to go for realstic.
A smoothed object giving smoothed shadows.

Hard edged giving hard edged shadows.

millighost, I'm not sure whether you're being sarcastic or not.

It looks like the ray traced shadows are incorrect... The rounded cube should cast rounded shadows.  I have to agree with vilters.  The shadows should match the visual appearance of the object, not its base geometry.  If this error also occurs with displacement, it's another good reason not to rely on displacement maps for anything that might alter a shadow significantly. This is something that should probably be addressed in future versions of Poser.

mori, milli's right.  I forgot about displacement.  I was thinking of shadow edge blurring as a function of distance from the object edge to the shadow.  in that case, raytrace calculates it correctly, but shadow map doesn't.  they should use displacement when needed.

FF has some severe raytracing issues, this is just another one.

raytrace shadows indeed can't cope with smoothing or displacement maps (just tested), but can produce crisp shadows with a nice distance fade-out. Depth map shadows do cope with smoothing and displacement (just tested again), and also can make crisp shadows with fade out (might be wrong?) but then one need to crank up the resolution. 2048 or 4096 or so.

We have both for a reason - neither is perfect for everything.

Poser raytracing does not handle displacement, because if it did then your entire scene would have to be diced into micro-polygons instead of just the current bucket.

I understand that artbee thinks this is why Poser isn't real raytracing, like LuxRender, for example. But LuxRender avoided displacement for a long time, FOR THIS REASON - so it can avoid the responsibility to raytrace displaced surfaces. It has it now (called microdisplacement) but it is based on mesh subdivision, not some built-in feature of the renderer. Essentially it bakes your depth map into new geometry. Very expensive.

Poser gives you a choice - use it like a raytracer (don't use displacement) or use it like Pixar (don't use raytracing) or if you're good enough, you decide where and when like a Pro. And you don't argue that one is better than the other - that's like saying red is better than green.

LuxRender Wiki explains that it has bump, displacement, and microdisplacement.

Quote - Microdisplacement is a method of displacing the surface on the fly, as the ray intersects it. This removes the need to pre-subdivide the mesh and store all the extra polygons in RAM, however it means part of the displacement calculation must be performed every time a ray strikes the surface. This can reduce performance, sometimes drastically if a high subdivision level is used. Microdisplacement subdivision works differently from the normal loop subdivision used for regularly displacement or smoothing out meshes. You will need more levels, such as 5-20 or more, to get a proper effect.

Poser doesn't have this because it is motivated by hobbyists who want a render in 15 minutes or less, unlike the typical LuxRender 1 to 4 days.

doublecheck: recent version(s) of poser can render ray-traced displacement shadow, provided certain render settings are used, e.g. enable raytracing.

Quote - mori, milli's right.  I forgot about displacement.  I was thinking of shadow edge blurring as a function of distance from the object edge to the shadow.  in that case, raytrace calculates it correctly, but shadow map doesn't.  they should use displacement when needed.

So you're saying it's more realistic for a round looking object to cast sharp angled shadows? 

Guys - raytracing does render displaced vertices. It does not render displaced polygon interiors - it interpolates the geometry between the moved vertices.

So - some props will be obvious that you're missing displacement in the shadow, others not so obvious, and still others, nothing missing at all. It's a question of how similar is the virtual object with displaced vertices alone, versus displaced individual micropolygons.

This is also true of reflections or refractions. It isn't just shadows that are affected by the simplified perspective of displaced vertices. I wrote about this six years ago when I first published matmatic.

The micropolygon displacement that Poser performs is visible in depth-mapped shadows, but not in raytraced, because of memory problems. When this was decided, nobody, not even Pixar, had 4 GB of RAM in a single computer.

Personally I think we should be allowed to switch on full-object micropolygon displacement, and not be limited to a bucket, but seriously other than in your contrived demonstrations how often does this come up?

This image, dated June 15, 2006, was one of my showcase images for the feature.

The green pedestal is actually a Poser box. Its shape is the result of procedural displacement.

The brown thing is a Poser cylinder, also displaced using math.

The reflections of these things do not appear to match - because the raytracer is not REYES. The REYES part runs separately. That means micropolygons don't exist for the raytracer in Poser.

But - if there are enough vertices, the difference is small. I confess I never fully worked out what the cutoff is. It just doesn't come up in practice so working it out has never been a priority for me. Knock yourselves out if it really bothers you.

These pillars are also just Poser cylinders.

And, yes, that's a nude V3 peeking around one of them.

They do.

The red object is actually a completely flat square prop. It has vertices every 20mm (roughly .79 inches). This is plenty of resolution for everything to come out right.

I could probably get it to do everything right if I felt like it, but I haven't got the time or interest.

If you're getting bad results, you need to up your technique, not bitch. Poser is like a car. The driver matters.

This is an infinite light, with shadow blur radius = 7, samples = 210.

Render time was 6 minutes 22 seconds.

IDL is on, 4 raytrace bounces, IDL Samples=750, IDL IC=70, Pixel Samples=6, Min Shading Rate=.25, Filter=Sinc,3, Gamma=2.2

I purposely darkened the EnvSphere image so that most of the light was from the infinite.

Even if you only wanted .2 inch resolution for shadows, to cover a 1000 foot square block you'd need 60000 pixels on a side of the map. That would be over 7.2 GB of RAM just for the shadow map.

And even then it would not be good enough if you also have a person in the foreground. A nose shadow would display jaggies.

The only way to get the proper 1/2 degree blur from sunlight over the entire scene is raytrace.

hi BB

back from sailing I see. I like the reflection example, must have missed it in 2006 :)

My main point is the following (and we agree, as far as I'm aware):

especially when it comes to reflection, refraction and shadowing, the methods, options, settings and results from FireFly cannot be fully understood in terms of rays and tracing alone. One cannot do with simple schemes and base logic only, one has to show and tell using FF renders - as you're doing above. FF might be different.

FF results may differ from expectations, differ from those produced by recent resource intensive routines using "classical/pure" raytracing. Plus some FF methods / material+light settings are harder to comprehend because they're around for compensating the shortcomings of FF - and then one needs to accept and understand their existence first.

According to this thread and many others, a lot of Poser users don't find it easy to do so.

Whether or not FireFly is using "pure" raytracing for handling some situations is something I cannot determine from the outside, but

• It hardly did when it was the NPR:Reyes 3DSMax plugin and brought into Poser 5 (2000/2002), and I've not seen major changes since then (with respect to this area)
• I can dream up an algorithm - efficient or not - that produces the same pro's and con's in this area as FF does, without using any pure raytracing technique
• I've never seen any explicit proof that FF does raytrace indeed instead of doing it differently

but nevertheless, I keep on stating that FF "is not raytracing" to make people aware that its workings and result do deviate from expectations and pure raytracing routines. It does come pretty close though, and one could question the relevance of the deviations, but I happen to know some Poser users that make a sport out of making those as small as possible.

FF issues in overview:

• handling thin glass / dual reflections
• handling varying thickness of colored glass
• handling colored shadows/projections from wineglasses and stained glass windows
• handling direct light and objects + indirect lighting completely separate
• handling fresnel for thin glass/metals and for thick glass w/direct light - we've got a fresnel node now for glass reflections only, and why do we need a separate node in the first place? It's to compensate a fundamental shortcoming IMO.
• handling reflection / refraction / shadow from distorted surfaces (displacement, smoothing, ...) 
• shiploads of hard to comprehend / to explain material nodes and parameters that I've never seen in pure raytracers (because they don't need them)
• and so on

So let's face it. This is our Poser, this is our Firefly, it's pretty good, and unless someone starts adding something very fundamental, these issues won't go away. For by far most people, those "issues" won't bother at all. Some might seek improvements elsewhere, and interface with Vue, Max, LuxRender or anything. Which - according to the Law of Conservation of Misery - will bring new issues by itself.

Let's render. And learn.

Well, not to sound unappreciative of the responses, but so far not one of these has answered my original question, why won't Poser render Depthmap shadows, even when I have them on the light AND shadows turned on in render settings?

I have a very specific reason for asking because the program is NOT doing what I'm telling it to do and this is not the first time I've rendered shadows, so it's not like I'm trying to learn something new, just all of the sudden it refuses to render Depthmap shadows.  I'm not asking for alternate lighting, I have an actual software problem.

I did forget to mention this is Poser7
 

However, I can use some of this info for later tests, so don't feel as if it was suddenly wasted.

Since you don't show any settings to prove they are identical, I'm going to guess they are not identical. For example, I might guess that one has a shadow map size that is way too small and the shadow detail is so smeared out you think there is no shadow.

Show the scene. The size of the depthmap depends on the size of the scene.

The infinite light positions its light to cover all items in the scene. If it is large you have to increase the depthmap accordingly - or - position the shadowcam to cover the area where you want to have shadows with the x,y translation and the scaling the shadowcam down

Example: If yoou have only one figure in the scene, the mapsize of 1024 is sufficient. However if you include a city around it with the same scale, the mapsize needs to become huge to see the shadow on the figure because it now uses the map to show shadow details of all the buildings as well. However - if you zoom in with the shadowcam onto the figure with the translation dials and the zoom, the shadow will return. Anything outside of the shadowcam will now have no shadows

That's why raytraced shadows are a lot easier to use

Quote - Since my question kinda got bumped off, no one actually asked for settings, so here are my settings for the current light set I was working on and my render settings, if there are other settings you need to see, let me know.

You should check your shadow camera settings; select the "Shadow Cam" for the light, to test if the object you are lighting is in the view of that camera (i find this easier to do when the light is a spotlight, not an infinite, so i set the type to spotlight before messing with the shadow camera, and set it back to infinite after i am done). Usually it is not that easy to destroy the shadow camera by accident, but still possible and often hard to track down.

Another thing i noticed in your screenshot, which might be relevant or not: the position of the brownish light in your light controls (the small planet with the moons) suggests that your brownish light is in a straight line behind the camera, so if you took a render with this configuration you will not see any shadow.

Also, with depth map shadows, if you have changed light sets in the same scene, sometimes an old shadow camera still remains from the previous light set and it screws up the depth map shadow casting.

Is Lower L the light we're talking about with missing shadow?

If so, you're aware that it's pointing up from below the ground, right?

And since you don't show the scene, I'm forced to guess that either:

1. The entire ground is opaque and casting a shadow, thus this light is not lighting anything. (Easily tested - turn off all the other lights and render - what do you see?)

2. There is nothing behind/above your subject for the light/shadow to land on so you're not going to see a shadow.

See, that's just it, it doesn't work on ANY scene, that's why I didn't show one, I could add a new figure, hit render and it won't render shadow maps.

The Lower L was just lit up like that 'cause I was messing with the brightness of the light when I posted this, those lower lights actually won't have shadows on them, again, just tests, was trying out new things.

Now, someone said something about the shadow camera, so I'm gonna look into that and see if it's messing something up, didn't know such a critter existed.