Since we last spoke I looked into some of Richardson's ideas.

Firstly I found that since I was using raytraced shadows, the shadow map setting had almost no affect on my renders at all, neither in terms of quality or time of render. I haven't done much with depth mapped shadows since I got Poser 6 - I don't know when I'll look into this.

I also found that the shadow blur radius didn't really affect time of render given the other settings I'm using.  It definitely changes the resulting render about as you'd expect - a low setting resulted in very tight shadows, a higher setting resulted in very fuzzy dispersed shadows.  I found with the settings I have here the higher radius produced unsatisfactory results - too grainy.  I believe I'd need to up the shade rate and the pixel samples to produce good quality dispersed (high radius) shadows - which would definitely increase render time.   The type of shadow you're going for will determine what you can do here - I generally like the sharper shadows myself, so I'm happy with the low radius settings.

I'm going to look into Richardson's comments about hair and transparency map size soon.  I'll report back here with results as I get them.

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