With older versions of Poser, depth mapped shadows lost clarity as your scene dimensions got larger.  Scaling your ground plane up, for example, increased the size of the area in shadow thus reducing its quality.  I found that the depth mapped shadows had to cover an area bound by the shadow casting objects, and that disabling cast shadows for far away objects would restore clarity.  I can not get anywhere near the quality of depth mapped shadows from PP2012 or PP2014 that I was getting in PP2010.  I am wondering if the way the shadow's area is being calculated has changed, if even objects with cast shadows disabled are being used to determine the size of a shadow.

Does this seem like a likely explanation, or is there something else I am probably just overlooking?  With PP2014's improved rendering speed, I'd hate to have to reinstall PP2010 just to create animations which match those I did two years ago.

Try unchecking "light emitter" on all your objects in the object's properties panel. Sounds like light bounce.

Do you have IDL checked in your render settings? That's the common thing between Poser's 2012 and 2014...and Poser 2010. 2010 didn't have it. The newer versions do.

Laurie

Quote - Try unchecking "light emitter" on all your objects in the object's properties panel. Sounds like light bounce.

Do you have IDL checked in your render settings? That's the common thing between Poser's 2012 and 2014...and Poser 2010. 2010 didn't have it. The newer versions do.

Laurie

PP2010 does have IDL... 

Did you install PP2014 SR1? It includes a bugfix for depthmapped shadows

IDL is unchecked in render settings, so I didn't see any reason to turn it off per object.  If it were light bounce I'd expect the objects to appear lit differently in the two scenes.  Other than the shadows, the images seem to be lit the same.

I am using PP2014 SR1 which gives same results as PP2012 which did not have the depthmapped shadow bug introduced in PP2014.  Just to make sure, I tried render in separate process, but no change.

I remembered I'd saved the lights to the library as well, but deleting the scene lights and applying them from the library did not change anything.

Changing the depth mapped shadows to raytrace has allowed me to get a similar shadow on the floor, but I'm still not having any luck restoring the shadow of the desk on the left wall.  I may have to look at my settings in PP2010, but that requires rebooting into XP...

The quality of the depthmap shadow is controlled by the size of the shadow map. You did not mention this, so have you increased it to a large value (4096).

Also - by default the shadowmap will try to cover every figure and object in the scene. You can limit that area by changing the area (zoom, move) with the shadowmap cam. Point that camera at the area you want shadows.

You may already know these things, but I am mentioning these just in case you didn't

Quote - The quality of the depthmap shadow is controlled by the size of the shadow map. You did not mention this, so have you increased it to a large value (4096).

Also - by default the shadowmap will try to cover every figure and object in the scene. You can limit that area by changing the area (zoom, move) with the shadowmap cam. Point that camera at the area you want shadows.

I didn't mention it because the only change between the two images is the version of Poser used to render them.  Shadow map resolution should be whatever the scene was originally saved with...

In PP2010 the shadowmap would try to cover every figure and object in the scene only if they cast shadows (it was possible to get a crisp mapped shadow underneath a figure even with a large ground plane if the ground itself had cast shadows disabled).  My background image is on a curved plane some distance from the room and its contents.  It is not a shadow casting object.  My best guess for the problem I'm having is that it is now being used by Poser to set the shadow size where it would have been ignored in PP2010 and before.

It hadn't occurred to me that I even could manually change the shadowcam.  This might solve my problem without answering why the scene renders differently to begin with.

Since I do not have the scene, I can't tell you what caused it. I do not see the same thing in my scenes. It is possible that there are changes in the handling of shadow maps due to other changes introduced in PP2012 (visible in RT, visible in Camera, shadow samples for IDL) but without having the scene or a repro scenario it is difficult to tell.