ghostship2 posted at 11:58 PM Mon, 20 December 2021 - #4432185

Make the background trees bigger, move them back further and use DOF blur to separate the foreground from the background trees. Just a thought.

Actually I did have another set of hills and trees behind at first. I took them out as the entire tree section just was not getting shadowed at all. I even tried a Spotlight set to Black with shadows at 1,000 and it did not help (I think that was an old trick, does not seem to work in SF). With the extra set of trees/hills it was very taxing on my system once the characters were added.
I considered DoF but getting too close to Christmas and just wanted to finish it.
Rendering was not too bad; about an hour and half or two hours with settings cranked up.

I could not get Cycles snow to pick up any shadowing at all so I switched to Poser Surface with a very low Ambient filtered through '3D Noise'.....lighting has always and still is my worse enemy