Thanks! I have had some trouble lighting this scene with a single light because it has some strange twists and turns. It is hard to get the light into its inner recesses. It is one solid object, not multiple props so whatever Min Shading Rate is set for any part of the Courtyard, it is set for the whole thing. To be fair to the product, I think it was originally made for Poser 5.

"Your render settings show Min Shading Rate = 0. That's really aggressive."

I have always liked sharp detail, but more so lately. Right now I am looking through a moderately dense cataract (which will be removed next month). I can't tell much difference between 0.5 and 0.0, and 0.5 is much faster.

"Then if the bump map is not a JPEG or is huge, I'd open it in Photoshop, and save it as JPEG, no more than 1K in dimension."

The bump map was a huge PSD file. I use IrfanView (a free untility) to do little tasks like resizing as it loads fast, works really fast, and doesn't take much memory. Resizing and saving in JPG format really cut the KBytes of the file, and I cannot see a difference in the detail.

You did not say, but I changed from Depth Mapped Shadows to Raytraced Shadows on the light. This makes for very harsh and dark shadows without IDL, but where I could see water, it looked much more realistic. I am running a render now with IDL. It is precalculating at the moment, and seems much faster.

Lesson #1? Not every rendering problem is the fault of Poser 8 and IDL.

LMK

Probably edited for spelling, grammer, punctuation, or typos.