This technique isn't applicable to the majority of Bryce scenes, but it might be something that you could use at some point. I suppose this could also work on any version of Bryce, as long as it accepts Trans Maps. Here was my setup; I wanted a darkly lit alien head to have shadows falling on it that would look something like a prison cage, wire or bars, etc...like he was captured or something. It turned out good enough, but the bar shadows were of the Bryce 4 hard-lined variety (as always). I had originally tried this setup when I had the Bryce 5 demo, but once I turned on my spotlights "soft shadows" along with a volumetric fog...the render would have taken 4 1/2 days for 800x600. (I never went through with it). Back now to just Bryce 4, it occurred to me that the bars were not actually showing in the render and...if I applied a gradient to a long 2D Face as a Trans map, and used that 2D face as my prison bars, the resulting shadow might have softened edges...I tried it and it worked. I can now render my set-up in around 8 hours vs. 4 days. I made the gradient 1024x1024 to get as much detail as possible. Transparency map was applied Parametrically. Material Options was set to "Fuzzy". Transparent and Transparency dots were set under the "A" (the gradient) Everything else was set to black or zero. The Transparency Slider can be raised from zero to increase the 2D Faces overall transparency, including the edges. Below is an example of my set-up. Agent Smith

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Like I said, not a technique that can be used in just any scene, but might be useful somewhere, somehow. Agent Smith

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"I want to be what I was when I wanted to be what I am now"

That's a good method of faking soft shadows - thanks for sharing. There are also some tuts out there using light arrays to fake soft shadows as well.

wow! nice! looks like a nice work around for fake foilage etc! thx!

Its always great to have a shortcut for render times. Thanks.

It's a good one AgentSmith...Good technic. Thank you. Pleiades