face_off, I hope you are not disturbed I did not employ your Shader! I am a big fan, as you know. But after all was said and done, the ONLY reason I had to render in Firefly was to get your skin shaders to engage, I just could not justify the render time hit between the two options. It was the engine, not your product, at fault. Average render time for these 1800 frames as rendered on Poser4 engine... 46 seconds Average render time for equivelent FireFly render: 147 seconds. But important: IT IS NOT BECAUSE OF THE SHADERS or anything to do with face_off's product. The product DOES increase render time, in my experience, but only a very few percentage points, no matter how complex. The real culprit was flicker. When you shoot in deep shadow like this, with lights set back (to accomodate shooting thru the blinds), you start to get very small angle of incident along the model's side...such as across the back of her cheek and near the ear when she is facing the light head on. This extreme angle, combined with low light, REALLY agrivates the problem of FireFly numeric overflow. What this means (for those who have not been following other threads on the subject) is that that from one frame to the next, the data is not resolved to the correct (or sufficiently deep) decimal point, and you get 'flicker" So, I of course took the step of 'scaling up' and this scene is scaled up not times 10 (1000%) but 100 TIMES (10,000%). It was stil not enough to blow out all the flicker with FireFly. So, I had to move the light closer, no problem, that helped. I had to turn up the light intensity and add a third light. (originally, my desire was even deeper shadow and noir in this scene.) Then, I had to start kicking up the settings. Blowing the shadow map size up to 1024 got rid of more of the flicker, but it also extinguished the nice blur and softness of the shadows. They were harsh; Lin looked like she was in jail! Bringing the shadow map size back down...I kicked up the pixel samples, knocked down the minimum shading rate, like down to .02, played around with the shadow blur radius and bias, etc. The best average render time I could get with no flicker and the soft great shadows was 147 seconds. With some settings it was blown out to 5,6,7 minutes. Now, during this process I caught on that I may have not exploited the AngleStart/AngleEnd feature enough, and with more fiddling I probably could have worked into a solution that got me maybe to 100 seconds, or 90... But this is only an excercise. I have to move on. So I rendered with the Poser4 engine and no face_off driven shaders engaged, just the Selene texture with a bump map made from it. The quality of the image resolution-wise with all that FireFly power dialed in...very nice, but not dramatically better than that produced by the older engine. LOL. I thought shooting in low light was going to be an 'easy' route...no forty-light-set-domes and ray trace and simulated GI...little did I know. Thank you for your kind remarks face_off. ::::: Opera :::::