pjz99 that is a really creative solution for raytraced blurred soft shadows. Thanks for sharing.

A few notes in general: for an animation you are always shooting for fast render time per frame, so exploring low settings is a frequent strategy. But with depth map shadows, beware the famous "flicker" effect at low settings and close up.

If you have any dynamic hair in the scene and want raytrace shadows, you are facing gigantic rendertime hits unless you turn off "visible to raytrace" for the hair. But if you turn off raytrace on hair your hair will not be casting shadows. What to do, what to do. Either live without shadows from hair or throw in a depth mapped light just to cast shadows from hair. Or...accept the hit.

I highly doubt that the P4 render engine is faster that Firefly....for the same effect in the scene.

I've been playing with raytrace in Carrara 6Pro, which has soft options. It works pretty well, but I found to get the really soft you have to multiply your lights and keep the settings of each low.

I am going to carry pjz idea of clustering multiple lights with only a small position difference into my Carrara trials.

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