Comments welcome. Ambient light = 0. This scene has 1 Sunlight light positioned in the 4winds atmosphere to shine through the window. 3 more bulb lights around the room for radiosity. The only problem I having is the strange shadow artifacts that are left on some surfaces. There extremely dark shadowy corners and shapes on some surfaces where there should be none. Luckily, they are not visible from this angle but, I will post another image to show you what I am talking about.

Since I'm one of the judges, it would be inappropriate for me to offer any critiques. But I do want to address this: "Ambient light = 0" This is something everyone should do when creating a scene in Carrara, IMHO. Get rid of the ambient light. Kill it, it's worthless. Take COMPLETE control of your lighting and your scenes will start looking better instantly. Just my 2c. -Otis

The only problem with that is that the "shadow artifacts", as I mentioned earlier, are more pronounced. This is strange and causes much heartache when trying to simulate radiosity on an indoor scene.

Then don't use the "4winds atmosphere" as a lightsource, if you're not going to see any sky in the scene. Use a spotlight set to soft shadows with a gel to simulate the sky colors you want. -Otis

Thanks. I'll try that.

Very nice, dotpainter. Your glazed donut is spot on and the best I've seen yet. Nice! Dave

Thanks for the information. I tried all of the suggestions you gave me and still I have the same problem. This is what I got with only 1 light and no atmosphere. The object was repositioned near the light and still the same problem. I think this has something to do with the object itself, because if you look closely at the counter or top of the microwave, you can see a subtle fish eye effect where the surface is perfectly flat and should not cause such a reflection. One of the worst examples of this problem occured within a room I created. The walls had a circle of light in the center and black around the edges. I had to recreate the flat walls as spline objects to get rid of these shadow artifacts after initially using a plane object.