"Len, this is what happens in real life! Bryce is getting it right" It's not 'exactly' what happens in real life, and Bryce certainly isn't getting it right. TA calculations can never be compared to real-world activity other than the obvious job it does of giving a good representation. TA calculations like I said, are very crude - and it's this crudeness that forced me to change PR from 100 to 50. Remember the first Moonlit-Room image in the other thread? - That was when I too thought 100% was obvious :-) From that point onward, the only thing I could do is experiment more, I did - and it lead to the realisation that 100% with TA is a definate no-go! Think about it - if I'd had it right in the first place of using 100%, why would I make such a drastic change? You're seeing PR as only half the solution it's supposed to be, and while the shadows argument might seem a no-brainer in isolation, it takes on a whole new importance when you want to bring balanced materials into the equation. The problems with TA have a knock-on effect on balanced materials and destroy a lot of potential realism. "Ah yes. I've pretty much solved that with setting materials with an ambient level of 60 instead of 100." That's great, but if you did that in PR without considering the material rules - you'd break it. "I'm doing a couple of renders right now that I think will confirm my suspicions that the light that comes through opaque objects when shadows are set at 50 does not interact with True Ambience very well at all." Once the light hit's a surface that's it! That surface is what it is, and will have exactly the same effect it would have if were already that intensity. That's one of the reasons I'm playing dirty, in order to compensate for the excessive bias of TA. "But somehow I don't see True Ambience as a priority project in Bryce6." lol - Me neither. I just wish they'd add Motion-Blur, Caustics, and A 'working' TA or Radiosity into the current renderer. And whatever they do, they'd better not remove the 'progressive' ability - that's what worries me more than anything. Rayraz, that's impressive thinking. What you're getting at all boils down to luminance. Based upon luminance, I could make PR as near perfect as possible no problem. But it's too complicated a method to expect an artist to manage all that would be involved, manually. If Bryce had scripting ability, luminance-based logic would indeed be the way to go. Again, it's important to remember that PR needs to be the best comprimise of speed/accuracy/reality in order to make it a usable product. Unfortunately, it's not possible to have the best of all worlds - I wish it were! Len. (Peter, those renders are vile - stop it, stop it right now!)

The wait can be horrific, but the outcome can be worse - pumeco 2006