This one was done with Premium settings: blurry transitions and blurry reflections and true ambience, at 256 rays per pixel. Time: 2 hours 58 minutes Size: 720 x 750

I also did just parts of the picture without the blurry effects and with soft shadows turned on, as well as without the reflection on the texture. Unfortunately, it didn't get rid of the grain in the gray default ground texture. Anyway, what's interesting is the darker part around the figure. It's apparently the shadow of the white 2D plane i used to bounce the light off. Since I used a starry sky preset and turned off the sunlight, I can only conclude that the scene was lit by starlight. Sounds very poetic, and even might be useful. And probably ties to the Using Texture as a Light thread. Another interesting thing is the hair. No reflection and no texture, the ambience of 28.8. The colours used were pure black for Diffuse, RGB 35/4/2 for Ambient and RGB 54/1/0 for Specular. How did it come out Tizian Red, I don't know. I hope these are not overcompressed.

It's a cool shadow test, but AGAIN, there's nothing radious about this work. It falls into the "soft shadows" category.

Im sorry but your wrong. The colors bleed into other objects. That image doesn;t show that but youcanclearly see it when your working on it.

I beleive you about color bleed, sir JDW, but alas, in this image that Erlik has posted the only color is on the hairpiece, so I see no actual color bleed at all? I meant no insult, only an observation. I think Dan cleared up all these terminology issues for us in another, recent post...

Shadow, what do you think the white on the shoulders is? It is the colour of the plane above, not the colour of the shoulders. So they picked a colour from another object. That would make it radiosity, as far as I understand that. And if you zoom in the browsers, you'll see a thin red line around the hair, which is not a JPEG artifact, as far as I can tell, because it's present on the render, too. BTW, whoever said that the colour bounces once, was wrong. (Or I remember incorrectly.) If you look at the underside of the arms, you can see the white colour of the light bounced off the ground. So the light goes Spotlight -> Plane -> Ground -> Arms. There's no reflection in the second pic, where I turned off the reflection on the skin. But TIR was turned off in the first one, and on in the second. BTW 2, the image has colour, too. :-) Take a close look at the body. BTW 3, what I like about this is that it gives proper shadows: further from the ground an object is, the lighter the shadow. Notice arms' and legs' shadows.

(glares at self) Reflect : 1. To throw or bend back (light, for example) from a surface. 2. To be bent or thrown back: "Her voice reflected off the canyon walls." Radiate : 1. To issue or emerge in rays or waves: "Heat radiated from the stove." 2. To emit (light, for example) in or as if in rays. Dictionaries are sometimes the key to understanding language, and communication is based off of fundamental, standardized sound-parts, so that we can indeed make sense of each other.