You're welcome (the nolight-scene). :) OK, tried it out--weird indeed, but very nice rig. :D Turning up the brightness fixed it, though. Which makes me speculate: It might be that you're hitting some render precision threshold with your 104 dim light sources. I experienced a similar problem when trying to shade a scene with very dim light sources--colour banding, and with additional lights, colour cancellation and augmentation occured. Adding softness spread the "colour error" so far that it tinted the scene itself. Might be much the same here--there's so many "dark" lights illuminating the scene, that it's probable that you're hitting an internal precision limit of Vue's . . . well, I'm looking forward to the reply by e-on, until then it's just guesswork. Regarding softness: a value of 45 is very, very high and will take a long time to render at a decent quality setting as proposed in my first post here. Hence, the graininess. You'll only get rid of it (but not completely) by using an excess amount of anti-aliasing. With 104 soft shadows, rendering will take ages, I'd guess. I did a trial render at 320x200, and it already took a full 15 minutes--with nothing but a sphere in it. ta, -Sascha.rb