WIP as a tribute to C.S. Lewis. This is render with no post. Lighting achieved with radial lights both positive and negative. The thing just seems too sterile to me. I'm pleased so far but I'm stumped at what to do to take it to the next level. Suggestions pls?????????? Keep it simple, remember I'm no expert. Any post effects to try??? The little man will be explained in narritive of final gallery posting. Black blood will be oozing fm his foot. Should it carry 'violence' tag? Too many questions?

Shadows. Shadows under the dragon candle holder to paper. Shadows under the paper to tabletop.(left side) Shadows under the little dragon on top of paper. Eyes either deepen the red colour or make them slightly bigger to give that ' I'm watching you' feel to them. Dont mean to give you lots more to do but most of this can be achieved in postwork. Great idea and composition, well done

Smile, your dead a long time :)

Okay, why can't I get shadows? I turn cast shadows on and off on negative lights and positive lights both, fiddled with settings of both positive and negative lights. I checked materials and receive shadows is on. I'm using Bryce preset sky "all Black" with sun shadows turned off. The only shadows I seem to be able to achieve (using small dragon on parchment paper as reference) is by turning on sun cast shadows. I'm stumped still. Parchment material is picture based. Would that have an effect?

If all else fails make new lights. It might be a bug. Get some shadows. If you have phtoshop a nice bit of postwork to do is to distort diffuse glow in photoshop. Do it in a layer and set the opacity so that it looks good. I find a lot of times that filter gies images that extra something.

The wit of a misplaced ex-patriot.
I cheated on my metaphysics exam by looking into the soul of the person next to me.

Do you mean that Shadows are checked "off" in the Skylab? I believe the Skylab's shadow-tab (not the one for clouds) is a global shadow tab. What you need to do is turn the SUN off in the Skylab, but leave shadows checked on... It's a very dark image. I think it needs to be much brighter on the paper-areas (ends of hands, candlestick) and darker towards the edges, as you get further from the candle. You can achieve this with "squared falloff" in the candle-lights themselves. Note that you will have to turn their brightness value way up, and probably use multiple lights, like a ring of 6 or 8 radial lights around the candle-flame object. Make sure the candle-flame object has shadows turned off, too! Good luck, keep posting render of this scene, it's pretty cool!

Thanks!!!!!! I just learned something new. The day is not wasted. @InfernalDarkness Stange screen-name for someone so adept at light! The problem was in skylab. For some reason if Sun/Moon shadows is turned off all shadows are disabled globally. I turned it on and changed color of sun to black to negate its effects and am now happily playing with my radial lights to get desired lmood. I'll experiment with the light array suggested also. @ Dann-O I just got PS and will try to figure out filters you suggestd. mucho thanks again.

This is better, in my humble opinion. I'm satisfied enough to start final render and on to postwork. This one is a prelim and compressed for this forum post. Couldn't have done this with out your pointers.

One thing I do when I want to truly control my lighting in an internal scene or where external atmospheric effects are not needed was to create a big sphere and work within it. This takes the sun out of the lighting equation but leaves the shadows functional very easily.

Pass no temptation lightly by, for one never knows when it may pass again!

You can take the sun out of the equation by simply disabling it in the Skylab and turning Atmosphere off.