Oh, OG. I am not entirely sure what nomuse meant there.Interobject reflection isn't really a feature in Carrara, I don't think, unless it's another name. The term refers to more of a phenomenon where one surface relects off another. I think they might be referring to a reflection map.(Might be neat to see what caustics look like...however that would kill render time.)

yes, I saw that feature, the list of include/exclude for lights to hit. It would come in handy in certain situations.

Sorry...I meant "Indirect", I was just too lazy to see what exact word Carrara uses to mean that. I love that last render. I have found, in using GI (which I use in almost all of my renders now -- particularly Indirect -- ) that with photon counts much below 4,000 nasty blotches show up on large surface that are predominently lit by reflected light. I think that one-hour render beats Poser's mark for realism. Perhaps, tho, we should save on render times and see what kind of shortcuts we can come up with for glamour instead?

The last one with the GI looks good on the skin, because you can at least see detail in the shadowed areas, but it's definitely not worth the hour+ rendertime compared to the 8 min render. The hair looks just as good in the 8 min render as in the GI one, the main difference being in the shadow details. If you are able to get the GI one down to, say 10 min, then it would be worth it, but you'd end up with lots of artifacts. You'd better test ALL of these in a real animation, because what you see in a still might not translate well to motion.

nomuse, the blotches could be from interpolation. Do you have that on? I think the key is going to be in the maps, as always. I think you can get by w/ less than optimal settings w/ great maps. Which brings me to my earlier query do any of you use the daz digital beauty kit or any of the stuff in it?

I usually turn off interpolation. It doesn't seem to speed the render significantly, and I suspect it in causing artifacts.

Jimbo, you are wise to suggest doing an animation; i am all too familiar with artifacts and flicker in animation with settings pushed low to save rendertime. I have not yet attempted to get anything of quality with regard to the skin or face illumination. All my trials have been to see if I could get fully resolved hair at reasonable times. Ive now got it down to 6 minutes, 49 seconds, which is very close to my Poser times, although the Poser renders have beautiful results on everything including hair. Hopefully, I could get finished results without going all the way back to 10 minutes. For this close-in work with hair, I really hope to stay on a par with Poser on my current hardware. That way, I could purchase two Carrara-optimized computers (dual core and/or dual processor) which, according to time trials I've seen, should double or triple my speeds. Then, for the non-dynamic hair and/or long shots, I should be way ahead of the game with Carrara on those systems. I'll run an animation with the 8 minute settings to see if I get artifacts. ::::: Opera ;::::