Attached Link: http://www.3drender.com/index.html

In the new book Digital Lighting and Rendering by Jeremy Birn, there is a lighting tutorial on faking soft shadows with multiple spotlights arranged in a row. He illustrates this by lighting a simple lamp on an end table with about 8 spotlights placed horizontally in a crescent arrangement. This wraps the light around the objects very convincingly and really looks like soft shadowed lighting. He provides lighting diagrams and everything. Pretty soon I'm going to break down and actually buy this book. ;-)

IIRC, he also explains how to cheat indirect lighting using a similar method with lights set to cast no shadows.

I'm sure there must be a way to cheat soft shadows and indirect lighting in Carrara's regular raytracer using an adaptation of this method. Sure, lots of lights increase your raytracer rendering time, but I bet it's faster and more reliable than using GI.

Also, Birn strongly advocates multiple-pass rendering on his website (and in his book no doubt) in part to cut rendering times.

Incidentally, I'm also in the process of redoing my 1701, originally made in RDD and rendered in I-D. I agree that Amapi is better suited to this, especially for the secondary hull. I won't post pictures because it's just not ready for prime time yet (and I'm a lawyer-hobbyist, not a full-time artist, so it's quite a while off yet). Helps to live in the DC area, though, where I can go look at the original for reference.

The link is to Birn's web site.

A.