An overdue sequel! Split into "plot" and "technical" descriptions. PLOT: Three friends spent the evening at the honky-tonk listening to a local country band, Bigger Than Horses. ROBIN (left), like many young women, is enamored by musicians. She heard a rumor that the drummer has a thing for... a certain type of gal, so Robin is trying to get noticed. Not TOO hard, of course. AUTUMN (center) said she would only enjoy this ironically, but I think a little sincerity is creeping in. She is operating under the assumption that the guy she's dancing with is also only enjoying it ironically... I sense something awkward is about to happen. For CLAIRE (right), the moment is bittersweet. More than her friends, she realizes that in the not-so-distant future, her life will be very different than it is now, with far more responsibilities. So, tonight, she is hoping to just have some fun and make a few memories. -------- TECHNICAL: This isn't the best picture I've ever done, but it is probably the most ambitious, and I was really testing the limits of what can be done with what I have. It has seven figures, seven lights, depth-of-field, and atmospheric effects! Grand total rendering time was THIRTY HOURS. As an image, it wasn't worth the effort. As a learning experience, it was. First of all, I wanted to see if my computer cooling was adequate. It isn't. I could have rendered much faster, but I couldn't render at top (or even half) speed for sustained periods due to the heat. I need to change this. Second, I believe that the Poser/Firefly implementation of atmospheric effects looks better. I almost did this that way, but Poser was not playing nice with the characters (Genesis) I wanted to use. I don't know if it's a limitation of LuxRender or the Reality plugin, but atmospheric effects only seem to work properly with spotlights for some unknown reason. It's a limitation of DAZ Studio that spotlights have no falloff. If you ask the Reality plugin for something that won't work, like using a Photon Map with volumetric effects, it won't do it. It gives you something that will work, but there is no feedback that it's doing this. LuxRender lets you save a render in progress and pick it up again at a later date. I discovered that if you use the Photon Map style, when you resume, it has to calculate the photon map all over again... Which can take a LONG time. Plus, calculating the map only uses one thread/core. So that's it. I gained a little enlightenment about the process. Maybe I'm wrong on a few of these things but that's the way it looked from my perspective. Maybe I'll post a Poser version just for comparison. Thanks for viewing and reading this LONG story!