Anyone curious about why we don't have one click lighting and photorealism would do good to hunt out a TPB titled [digital]Lighting and Rendering, 2nd edition, by Jeremy Birn. He's a technical lighting director at Pixar (two of his credits are The Incedibles and Cars), and read the book. It is pretty much render application neutral, and the thrust of it is achieving the effect, not simulating the real world. How? You cheat. You learn how real lighting works, and then you find the most efficient cheat. Real world lighting is an -analog- process. Digital simulations of an analog process involve complex simulation formulas and floating point math that can go out to 200-300 places to the right of the decimal point before the granularity of the digital process is fine enough to be ignored. Probably the first, and classic cheat he shows in passing is the table lamp and shade. Lots of newbies get frustrated with this kind of mesh; they think all they have to do is plop a point light where a bulb would go in real life, and it works just like the real thing. Except it doesn't, due to facts like light bulbs are acting as diffuse scattering shells for a source of light that is actually linear (look at a filament; not just a point in space, is it). Lampshades typically have white interiors of translucent cardboard, reflecting much of the light from the bulb back inwards (and bleeding some light through for decorative purposes, depending on the kind of shade it is. How much time would it take to model that shade with optically accurate materials or shaders applied to the required layers?), to eventually win free out the top or bottom of the shade, where interactions with the atmosphere and particulates create the perceived cones of light (and I'm not going to even try to get into atmospheric interactions....) The most common cheat? A point light and two spots, one pointing up, one down. The point basically just illuminates the shade for the bulb 'hotspot' and provides a bit of fill; the spots are what actually generate the light cones, and you have far more control over what is actually happening regarding your scene (you want a party environment? Keep the lamp spots at the same intensity, or make the upper one slightly brighter, to give a smoother fill to a scene. Need a dramatic desk shot? Dim the upper and increase the lower so that the eye is drawn towards the brighter area). You also have to define what you mean by photorealism. Like a picture snapped of outdoors? There are so many photons out there interacting with so many reflective and refractive and translucent surfaces and elements, the practical number of interactions may as well be infinite...multiplied over time and any motion of any of those elements. A studio portrait? You have floods, fills, rims and kickers being used in those....and if you use them in a CG app, you can create the illusion of that kind of lighting, just like a portrait photographer creates their illusions. And maybe most importantly, forcing some standard of realism is actually limiting control, not improving it. It may be a shortcut to one specific effect...but at the cost of flexibility and being able to break the 'rules' for a dramatic effect. Tanstasfl......