I just thought I would post the final largerimage here, it is called "Speak Master, your Servant is listening". I did solve my lighting issue with the light cones . I ended up duplicating my entire file and called it light cone,changed all of the objects to a pure black color and made sure I had just the lights I wanted on and did a render. I then went to my 2d app and used this light cone layer and used the "add" for this layer, it worked fairly well. The light cone layer only took like 10 minutes to render in Carrara at full size so it was pretty quick . I did several layers like this , I also stacked the layers in corel photopaint and adjusted the intensity which gives you more control of the lighting. One thing I should say the realistic sky setting has to be turned off or else the black areas of the light cone layer arent pure black and when you combine the layers things don't go well, this was causing me problems for a while. Anyways , thanks for the previous comments in the last post where I asked for help as I did use these ideas too.

Beautiful work.

Very nice Mike

Well done! Good idea about the light cone thing. I'll have to remember that. I'd be interested to know how you do in the competition.

More impressive on this size !!! And thank for the tip...

Still more impressive on this size !!! And thank for the tip...

very cool. i love to see when people do a nice job of lighting -- and the scenery and concept ain't bad, neither!

Wow! this just goes to show you that your modeling is as good as your lighting, how did you ever think of that idea with your 2-D apps and the light cones,and layers, it was worth the wait!

Thanks for the comments , its appreciated.
Odessey, I think this is how people use multi pass rendering, someone mentioned this idea when I posted previously for help on this issue a while back.

Zekaric, I am fairly certain I won't win anything. It is hard to tell how well you do sometimes if you don't win something or get shortlisted because they only post the winners and honourable mentions, so I may never know where I placed. Maybe CG talk will do it different this time and give the judging results.

Message edited on: 05/28/2005 10:24

Yeah. Seeing some of the other contests they've held, it's a seriously tough challenge. Well, good luck thought.