Spedler - there are situations where the raytraced shadows may work better, but I rarely find it to be so. This image, which could probably be fixed by tweaking parameters, shows an improvement of detail on the eyelash shadow, but does a bad job on the eyelid crease and the teeth. Plus, this render took almost 5 minutes.

The neat thing about depth mapped shadows is that you can calculate them once and just reuse. So my workflow is much improved by them. Position my character, props, and lights. I turn on the "Reuse Shadow Maps" option in the render menu. Once created, the shadow maps get reused in subsequent renders so it saves a lot of time. I can then change materials, light strengths and colors, and camera position, without having to recalculate the shadows. If I'm using the raytraced shadows, I experience the extra calculation time associated with the shadows on every test render. Of course, you could turn them off, but if you are trying to get the lighting/mat/camera angle just right, it slows you down.

So given the somewhat bad results and the increased times, I choose depth-mapped 99% of the time.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)