Kevin, after watching the final render frames come out for this sequence, I decided to examine what you you're doing with the lighting. In the scenes that have Light Lists, I've only found them for the characters, but you need to have Light Lists for the throne room lights too to EXCLUDE the characters. Why? Because a whole lot of time is being eaten up calculating Woot's Hair in those Throne Room ZBuffer shadows for no reason.

Also, after looking at the ZBuffer shadows from the character's Light List, try swapping to raytrace and see what you get. Hopefully, you'll save so much time from all those Throne Room lights not having to calculate Hair, that the render time will remain the same.

I'm also thinking you should put those Throne Room lights in a folder so I could <right-click><select all> and turn OFF "Active" while I'm testing. Also, set the "Active" Driver to "constant" on all those lights, and the set.

THESE SUGGESTIONS ARE FOR FUTURE SHOTS - YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO IT FOR THE FINISHED CHORS. (However, if you like the raytrace shadows on the characters better, we'll re-render. I think we're going to be re-rendering A LOT, so don't worry.)

Thanks for the suggestions Martin, I'll be looking at those tonight. I was wondering how to get those shadows from rendering, I even wrote up an AM report about it. I'll also give the raytraced shadows a try, but I'm not sure we want the super long render times we're getting now do we? Also, what does the active driver thing do?

You're a good man, Kevin. Your shots look awesome. I'd say nothing but we're working as a team here, so I felt comfortable imparting what little information a guy inside the debugger can tell you.

An hour a frame is our limit. The tests I ran seemed to indicate you could still be within that goal if the raytraced shadows were only on the characters.

It gets the model out of the "Final" render, (simply setting the Draw mode to "Invisible" still leaves the model in the "Final" render).

Ok, so I tried what you suggested Martin about the light lists on the throne room. Unfortunately it doesn't work since most of the throne room is in an action object. When I put a light list on the throne room it doesn't apply to anything but the floor, i.e. none of the action objects are lit with the lights from the list. I already submitted a report about a month ago about the limitations of light lists and action objects. Any suggestions?

I had to drop the light onto each of the Action Objects.

OK, tried that (I didn't have drivers on which is why i didn't see the action objects before). It's still not working for me, it never saves the light lists on the action objects and never renders properly even with the lists. Was it working for you? Should I submit another report?

Yes.