May be it's a stupid problem but... The "soft shadows" feature in the Sky Lab doesn't work. Thanks for help.

Did you use a preset? If you did it's a bug. Use a custom sky and set it to the same settings then set soft shaows.

I believe I remember this now; You have activate soft shadows in the sky lab. Then go into the sky presets and save that current sky. And, then I belive you have to go back into presets and re-apply that saved sky. Something like that. And, yup it's still a B5 bug.

What I'd do is disable sunlight and use a high intensity distance radial light with smooth shadows. Then again, I'd use a light dome with no smooth shadows. However, imho the most realistic results come from manually placed radial lights all over. Rendring right now, but it's taking forever because I have a sphere with a volumetric inside of it, with a visible 200 intensity radial light inside of that. And an additional 1200 lights in the scene OI!. The entire scene without the additional glass sphere takes 5 hours, including the 5 other objects. Soon as I added that, it took 6 hours JUST to render that sphere.. well 6+ it's still AAing it... So for outdoor I'd say one distance radial light is best. Most control. imo,

1200 lights?! That's a bit of overkill don't you think? :) I've seen real good results with at least half that number.

Attached Link: Earth image 3

I do think it's overkill. But, it would be FINE if I wasn't using transparent light refracting materials. Renders without the earth marble and big bang marble in under an hour, but add those and yuck... I am running on an athlon 2000+xp w 256 megs of ram (too low I know) but I've never had a render hang cept this one. If I do the whole screen full standard render, it hangs when it gets to the middle of the big bang marble. Here's a link to what I have rendered so far, you can see that it hasn't yet rendered most of the big bang marble but you can get a feel for the scene. Not sure it's even rendering it how I wanted Thinking of maybe surrounding that marble in negative lights to give it a blackhole effect, though I am not entirely sure... 

It may not be hanging it, it may be just real sloooooow when it get's there. My Seadragon's realm took about a week just to finish the AA.

Yeah, but it's very unfortunate, I only have one computer, so I can't leave it on another rendering. Hopefully once I buy a new mb, I will have enough spare parts to put together a render whore, bryce desperately needs one. It's really only that one object, atm I have the entire image rendered patch wise accept that one sphere, so I am going to do that next. Plus, I am running 98.... so multi day renders... they are out of the question. Again, I'll put 2k or nt on the render whore once I get it up. Then I'll be able to do the things I actually want to.

Hi... just wondering: how's the intensity setting you're using on the 1200 radial lights? I tried a scene with 9 at a setting near zero (I think it was 11) and they drowned almost everything in white. Is it a matter of scale and distance? Stefano

I run Win98SE and can run my comp for days without rebooting. It's very stable after a few wipi9ng of the HD and installing Win98 without all the updates from MS. I only have 1 900 Mhz machine but when I get the money I hope to build another machine to start a render farm.

After you add so many lights, I have found you not only have to set your lights to an intensity of 1, you have to change the color of the lights, meaning you have to dime your lights down. Instead of RGB being 255, take them down to 128, etc, etc.

Also, of course taking them from Linear light to Squared or Ranged.

Or, increase the range of your scene. The Globe alone in this scene is 5,000 brycian units; to give you some sense of scale. I did this to facilitate the lighting process. But 1200 is really pointless, was just a test... And yes, none of the lights are white, they are slightly yellowed or gelled. The gelled lights have an intensity of 400 But they are really far away.. The others have an intensity of 25-75 done in random sequence and are spread throughout the scene, in an attempt to forge some fake gi.

Thanx a lot for explaining me the light settings. So it's a matter of balance between intensity and scale of the image. Really helpful, guys :) Stefano

And color of the lights.

Yup, that also.