The sunlight soft shadow bug? You mean where the Sky Lab soft shadow would not stay switched on? That was fixed in b5.5, or at least I never had anymore problems with that since B5.5

HDRI speed; Using HDRI's for reflections, etc, etc, and for IBL (Image Based Lighting) slows down any render in any 3D program, by its nature its just more complex lighting, and by the nature of using an image to drive the lighting...it is automatic soft shadows.

That being said, its not that bad. You will find that different HDRI's will render a scene faster than others (I'm assuming this has to do with the complexity of the actual HDRI image, and how many exposure layers were used to create said HDRI image.

HDRI Quality Slider - This is the speed killer. This is the variable that will dictate the quality of the soft shadows. I do not suggest ramping this up to 100 and then complaining about render speeds. I'm telling ya right now, I have yet to see a scene that has a real noticable difference in its shadows with a quality of 25 vs a quality of 100. So, in short, keep it under 25, imo. And, in some scenes where the ground/floor is rougher than say a flat color on a flat plane...I have set the quality to zero. Still looks great.

How do the HDRI images look? I would say Bryce 6 has taken a very firm step further towards realism. I'll show you later on today, I have one in the hopper.

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