Well, that's a lie. A true-er test would be with NO lights, and I did a couple of those while setting up this scene. But this image turned out much cooler; it has one radial set to squared falloff, a few feet in front of and above her face. Other than that, the stats are : 64 RPP, TIR level at 10. 11-hour render time, mostly due to the refractions I suppose. Still too long to be worthwhile, but atleast it smoothed out the polys from the Poser character... More of a real-purpose test, tell me what you think?

Thats real nice, quality render and makes me think of an Aero advert!

I like those settings!....the spheres seem to carry "more weight" than normaly,like thay are not just a hollow object.TIR must make that more aparent in the render..but if you take TIR down to like 2 or 3 the render will be faster.

great render

Fantastic! and not a dragon in sight! I'm seriously impressed!

Aye, I was unconcerned with the TIR level, I usually don't go below 6 when I'm rendering with TIR effects. Note that this image was set to 10 both on TIR and on Ray Depth... Just something a bit different, trying to insert polygonal characters into a True Ambience scene without the poly diffusion...

Freaking beautiful, period.

^ what that guy said :)

Aye, thanks for all the encouragement. I think it's horribly simple, the only real work involved was moving the damn spheres around so they didn't contact the woman. I'll be back in the morning with a render of the same scene, but with reflective spheres instead of refractive spheres. It goes back to my anti-HDRI stance, back in the good ole' days...

The way the spheres reflest/refract their surroundings, it (for an instant) reminds me of soap bubbles. :o)

Oh My Gawd... Very nice! :)

And here's the refelctions version... Rendered in four hours, proof enough that refractions cost more than reflections! Thanks for checking them out...

bloody hell, I thought I'd replied to this one earlier. It's a splendid effect, shadow. I much prefer the top one on aesthetic grounds.