The Duel 1

There is no ambient. Only the lights that came with the model. I changed the settings on them, and that could be what I did wrong. I'm still learning how to work with the lights and creating natural looking lights and shadows.

Nice setup. Excellent use of the DAZ model. Good lighting, too. High contrast makesthis very dramatic - though personally I would prefer less dark shadows. But this is definitely a choice of the artist. Good work!

This was all done in Studio. I used the lights for the setting, but didn't change them like I usually do. I will work on it and gett he lighting set better, and correctly positioned. Not sure why it took 3 hours to render with only 3 of the lights using the deep shadows. You can't even see that characters all that well either. Something else I will try to improve.

Looks really good Alex. The textures are very colorful. The candle holders and other gold colored items seem to be glowing a bit too much. It might be ambient. As far as the rest of the house the shadows are really awesome. I am not sure exactly what this bright light source is supposed to be. I think it is wise of you to avoid the ambient channel in the materials, but the scene still needs some secondary lightsources the lighten up the shadows in a natural 3d way. Was this rendered in DS or bryce? My guess is DS, but I could be wrong. Nice work!!