I get nice comments all the time that say my renders are pretty good. (I beam with arrogant pride) But they also always agree that I have GOT to do something about the lack of shadows. (Ego deflation. I has a sad.) Everyone everywhere agrees that the nice, crisp, dark ray traced shadows are the best. Meh. Personally, I -LIKE- the soft, blurry depth mapped shadows. Plus, you only have to click one little check box. The downside is, they never appear where you want and generally don't do anything amazing. It's a sketchy thing at best. So tonight I dicked around with Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion in the Material Room for the very first time. (It scares me) The picture above took about 30 minutes to set up and pose. Then I spent the next 4 hours (yeah, 4 hours, I know...but I've never played with it before) diddling with the Material Room and the Ambient Occlusion settings. I'm determined to learn how to turn "OK" renders into "really good" renders. And all I know is, lighting is everything. I just don't know how to make those shadows appear where I want them and make them look good. The kind of shadows that I think look nice in a render confound the actual laws of optics. Either way, I can never get them to work. I always do it in Photoshop afterwards. But the last time I did a good one, everyone agreed that it needed shadows. So my post-work in Photoshop was a bust. So this render is me playing with the settings in Ambient Occlusion to try and learn it. YOu'll note tons of shadow problems, but all in all this is a major step forward for me. I've consulted tons of online articles, blogs, and How-To's. And the sad fact is that it doesn't appear to be a one-stop click to make everything perfect. You have to take each thing and work out the max distance and strength and blah blah blah. So hopefully this is the start of better things to come. I know most of you are rolling your eyes and saying, "Well duh. Ambient Occlusion is the only way to go. What's taking you so long? It's soooo easy!" Well, I'm slow, and not very good at doing anything artistic that doesn't have a "Press here for a perfect result" button. Thanks to the people who have dropped hints in the past about how to do shadows. I appreciate it.