but I have a few more questions. 1. Is there a way to change the sky once you've started down a scene path, or am I stuck with the one I first selected? I chose a daytime sky but would like to change to a nighttime sky both to lessen the light coming through the window and to accommodate possible future outdoor scenes. Baring that, can I change the Sun into the Moon. Did not see anything on doing that in the manual. 2. This was done in Preview mode. I put a point light on her torch and asked it to cast shadows. I also planted a dead tree outside that window in hopes of getting some eerie shadows on the glass. No shadows anywhere. Does Preview mode even do shadows? This took well over an hour to render. I hate to think what it will take in Final mode. Long time to wait just to find out there are no shadows. Thanks for all your help guys. This has been a great introduction exercise to begin learing Vue. I still need to do some tweaking, but it probably won't be a lot different than this. Maybe some mist near the floor, and if I can figure out how to get halos around the candles, maybe that too. Suggestions are always welcome. jon

Yeah, in the atmosphere editor, you have all the options in the world for changing your atmosphere setings, or you can load an entirely new atmosphere, as well, by clicking on the little file icon at the bottom right of the atmosphere editor. As for your shadows to show on your window, you have to first make sure that your sun (a directional light) is pointing at the tree, and the shadows are headed towards the window. Since this is an indoor scene, I'd just turn off shadows for the sun and use a spot on the tree, pointing it so it's casting a shadow on the window. Preview mode does cast shadows. Lighting in Vue is one of the more difficult things., but it's the same in all 3D programs. You just have to play around with it and learn from it. Not so sure why you want to turn your sun into a moon, if you can't see it. If you want it darker, you can change the setting for the brightness under the Light tab in the atmosphere editor. You can also change th ecolor of the light there, as well as ambient light levels, etc. Scene's coming along nicely. :)

Hi jstro..it's a small world.. I think you also want to turn Light Balance more towards sunlight to reduce ambient light even if you decide to delete the sun and use a spot. The light in your room is very even and It's a guess that you want to get dark corners and only partial lightings from her torch and trough the window or maybe I'm wrong... ;)

Hi HB. Yeah, I like the light settings I had on the orginal junky scene better and have been struggeling to somewhere close to that again. Seems like I have most of it set up the same but I've somehow lost the effect. I just spent 3+ hours rendering to come up with a room that is too bright AGAIN. :-( I'll tweak the lights one more time, then I'm done, no matter what it turns out like. jon

Preview will do shadows, but this looks like Sketch mode which doesn't do cast shadows or transparency. So you wouldn't see cast shadows, and you wouldn't see through the transparent window. If this is Preview mode, the ambient light is very high, and that will wash out the cast shadows. You should still have transparency on the window, though. Not sure what happened there.

I wanted to turn down the ambient light level but somehow could not figure it out. So I tried reducing the power on each point light instead. Still turned out brighter than I would have liked. To turn down the ambient light I did: Atmosphere Editor -> Light Tab -> Global Lighting and Adjustments -> and changed it from 50% to 25%. Much to my surprise, when I went back to render everything got MUCH brighter instead of darker. Looked like she was walking into a supernova. So I punted and fiddled with each candle instead, but as I said, still have a bit too much light. I'll post the finished project in a bit. jon

What I've started doing is going to the light tab, like you said, and putting the ambient light to 100% from sunlight and adjusting all of my materials to 100% diffuse and 0% ambient. The basic theory being killing all ambient lighting (which isn't very natural looking) and using fill lights to illuminate dark areas. Also, you can seperate you're lights into individual layers and by hiding layers and selecting render only visible layers in the render panel, you can render the scene with only one light at a time to see just what it is affecting. Like I said, I've just started doing this, so the jury is still out on it, but it might be worth looking into. Rich

Thanks for the tip, and thanks for the comment in the gallery. jon