Lighting experiment in DAZ Studio 4.5 Well, I got my new computer and it was worth every penny: my test render went from 29 minutes to 29 seconds. It took 2 hours to copy my files across and that was it, all running smooth as silk: a record for me. That's the good news. Now for the bad news, well ,sort of. I figured out how to get the shadows to render correctly. In the hallways, every light you can see on the ceiling has a spotlight, in the original versions I used " deep shadow map" on them to make the shadows. You can see the results in the upper picture. By changing the shadows to "Raytraced (Software Only)" the shadows come out correctly (see lower picture) - well, almost. I still can't get them to blur for some reason. I tested it with a single spotlight and it worked perfectly, but with about 20 of them it does not seem to be blurring the edges. The down side is that the Raytrace shadows setting slows down the rendering until it once again approaches the 29 minute time of the old computer ! General theory suggests keeping the number of lights with shadows down will be the best choice. Oh well, research is ongoing, I tried LuxRender via Luxus but it was even slower so unless anyone can point me to something better and not too slow I'll stick with 3Delight. Back to the story soon folks !