This is fifth or sixth time I've tried to start this thread. Apparently the previous time I got disconnected to taking to long to compose it. Here goes:

I've been trying to render a multi-layered scene with multiple characters, and I've followed all the suggestions I got a couple years ago for how to make it produce shadows on the background picture I rendered from the previous layer, (increasing pixel samples and irridiance caching, lowering bucket size, increasing the yon setting on the camera, making sure ground shadows and ground plane guide are on,) but it just won't make any shadowed even with just a single figure and a couple large .obj's. I've even removed the texture maps for every part of those .objs and simply assigned a colour to them in the materials room to reduce the load and still nothing. No shadows, even cast onto themselves from another part of the .obj that's in the path of the light chosen to create shadows.

So I tried using poser 4 rendering instead, but I keep getting an error message that says: "When using firefly you can reduce rendering memory usage by rendering in a separate process, raising the adaptation threshold or sepcifying smaller bucket sizes." I feel so damned stupid asking this but WTF is a "separate process"? Is it something you do with Poser or with some other program? I can't find any examples of it on line.

I have tried repeatedly to attach a screen shot of my render settings but the attach process won't work, either by selecting and attaching a file or by dropping or dragging. It's only a 70k .JPG. I"ve had to start this thread over and over three or four times because of that.

Also, does anybody know what that error message is talking about when it refers to "adaptation threshold"? There is NOTHING in the Firefly render settings that mention it. I thought maybe I'm going senile because I can't see it. I've sat and looked and looked and looked and still can't find it there. I swear to god, Poser makes me stupider every day. I've come sickeningly close to erasing 4 years of work and taking a baseball bat to this pc, but I just won't give the bastards at the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Aging Services the satisfaction of seeing me do that.

I'm using poser 7 on a windows 7 pc