I got the information from Stewar. He says "decreasing". Personally, I usually solve this problem not by adjusting the bias, but rather by scaling up. The reason: I can't figure out if stewar is correct or not...I HAVE solved the artifact problem by turning down the bias on the lights....but it does NOT work every time. There may be more than one variety of artifact. I am working on an animation right now that is subject to flicker, and is proving difficult to solve. While others (such as Maxxmodel) are reporting NO flicker in animations using IBL/AO, in Poser6 I can definately report that the flicker problem with depth shadow lighting remains a plague. I'll comment more when my current render is finished (about 15 hours to go) ::::: Opera :::::