Hi people, this is my idea for the speed challenge: I focused my attention on time. It's time that gives us the sense of speed.

Well, I remember a Limerik I read a lot of time ago, that says: "time flies - I can't - they're too quick"

[note for who's native language is not english - me too]
to time = calculate the speed of something, somebody
flies = plural of fly, a worldwide known insect

Who is the best candidate to time flies? I thought frogs.
Here you have two metafrogs and a boolotus.
The lotus leaf is made with that horrible application sponsored by drakulaz =D (LOL)
Plants on the background from 3D cafe free stuff
Fly still WIP

Now my question: I have a problem with lights. I used a light dome to flattern the image and give it a comic look, like my models. I disabled sun light and shadows, because render time is quite huge. But I don't like that there is not a shadow under the frogs and the lotus flower. I thought to fake it with texture or postwork. Maybe you know a better way to do it without increasing render times. It doesn't matter if it isn't 100% realistic - just something that fools the eye. Thank you for your suggetions, have a nice day /matteo

here's a quick idea. I just copied the base of the lilly using the magnetic marquee tool, flattened it, darkened it, and then moved it a bit lower and gave it a bit of transparency. but yeah, one way to fix it would be to render the frogs and the lilly separately with the same lighting using layer mask renders and then compositing them afterwards. the inverted masks could then be flattened and used. best idea I have for postwork. of course, you could always put a single spotlight in the geometrical center of the light dome and tinker with the settings of both the lightdome and itself until you can get a fait shadow that you can later increase in postwork. the third option would be dodging the dome alltogether and using just 8-10 lights (arranged in two crosses of 4), and with the one of them casting a shadow. you'll acheive similar results as with a lightdome. drac

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.ez?Who=Doublecrash&ViewArticle=3919

Another option will be to use ranged spotlights in your dome. If you range the spotlights, the rendertimes will reduce greatly. You just have to find out what range can satisfy your needs. Here's something I wrote long ago about ligthing using a ludicrous number of spots in Bryce (see link). Hope this helps, Stefano

Frogs: Time's fun when you're having flies. :^)

Ok thank you for suggestions. I tryed Doublecrash solution. It works well, evev if render time was increased 8x, but not 20x as I supposed. I made also some grouped lights with different color for a better ambience, following Drac's input. I find this looks better.

Nobody's mentioned how very cool those little frogs are. They're so alive and expressive!! And the textures are just brilliant :o)