"As for lots of lights.....if you turn shadows off completely - does it significantly impact quality? You could maybe just assign shadows to a single light - would save masses of rendertime."

Well, you don't always need all the lights to cast shadows, but certainly the more lights with soft shadows you have in the light dome, the closer it will look to true GI-like output in the end. Obviously, in most scenes, there will still be a key light with a higher intensity shadow value than the other ones.

Let's say you have 40 lights in your dome, but only 20 cast shadows. You'd spend a while playing with intensity and shadow bias/blur to get the same look, and then it still might show some shadow "banding" on your objects. If only the key light has shadows, but all your dome lights do not, then some parts of the scene might look "fake" because there are no 'area' shadows cast by the objects where you would expect to see them. You could get away with stuff like that in some cases though. Depends on the scene, and how close you want it to look to actual GI. Message edited on: 01/19/2005 18:04

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