I have very successfully faked radiosity in many situations but indirect lighting for the image above would really make it pop out. Glow is applied to bejuckets of objects in this scene! All the little white windws are glow white. They would totally screw this image up if I used indirect lighting. The same is true for the glowing red ball of which you can only see a crescent sliver of from this angle. There are way to many lights in this image and nooks and crannies to try to fake radiosity and GI/Indirect lighting seems to suffer in spaces which are enclosed of which this image is chock full! The image this size as posted wouldn't really show the shortfall of the soft shadow issue but when rendered full size with it applied, soft shadows generate ghosts and crappy artifacts ALL OVER THE PLACE! It's because the soft shadows appear to be more fixed in their fuzziness instead of really softened based on the distance of the object to the plane where the shadow is being cast and the location of the light. You can also get funky (very bad) results with soft shadows when applying them to spline objects which have cross sections in them with distinctly different shapes in the sections. RD had a different method of calculating soft shadows which had decent controls. It was changed in C. RD Soft Shadows were sharper closer to objects and became softer and softer the farther away you got. They were completely sharp right next to the object which removed the "hovering" problem C has. Environmental lighting can make shadows which do most of the things they should but I haven't figured a way to really get them to work to my total satsifaction. There are definite limits to EL. It changes from scene to scene a lot and takes quite a bit of work to get them right for each setup and it's very laborius for me. I have some setups where I could never really get it to work really well. -Kix

-Kix