Hello everybody.
I\'ve been quite busy lately, the lectures here at hut have started again. Plus I\'ve been doing some pretty sneaky things

But there\'s always time for something simple.

A candle and torch for Syzerian. Both are carryable light sources that a player could use to light any dark caverns his/her journeys go into. Flame oil and some old cloth may be used to greatly increase the burning time of a torch (the second texture). Candle burns for a couple of hours as it is, but you can\'t see too far in its limited light. Be careful when wandering into the lower levels, these light sources are not usable underwater.
Candle flame is a particle effect. The candle uses 128*128 tga and the torch has 128*256 tga texture. Candle texture has some transparency in the handle.
To JellyWerker: Good to see you again! I see that you\'ve also succeeded in adding the shadows to your pictures. The birdbath is so nice i just want to stay watch the birdies!

Your YafRay render looked very nice too. To the subject then.
You need to use shadows to prevent the light from passing through faces. Without the shadows, the light from the lamp is added to all faces depending on the angle and distance from the lamp. No faces block the light. In your lantern (looks good by the way) picture, the situation is exactly this. The light not only comes through the below, but it comes through all the faces. Ok, this all you propably knew. So let\'s see how we can change it.
You already know how to use the buffer shadow, as you use it in your previous pictures. The problem is that \'spot\' is the only type of light in blender that supports buffer shadows. And spotlight only gives light to certain angle. You could always use one or more spotlights.
The alternative way is ray tracing. Simply press the rayshadows-button down from the lamp options and enable ray tracing from scene options. You must of course set some of the faces transparent now, or all the light is contained within the lantern. It takes a longer time to render, but all lamps except \'hemi\' can cast ray shadows. In addition, mirror reflections and light refractions can now be used.
I don\'t think PS has any dynamic shadow calculation yet, at least not for the smaller objects, so we don\'t have to worry about that.
In your situation i\'d use the normal lamp with ray tracing. Here is a quick example image of lantern with ray tracing.

\"Inside the mansion of octarch of the fifth level, two minutes after he had been captured for treason.\"
I used normal lamp to create nice all around lighting, and enhanced the scene with low energy halo spotlight. There\'s also mirror using ray mirror and some refraction on the bottle.
That\'s all for now. Thanks for reading everybody! Yay, 10 000 views!

Pst! There is a crooked mouse pointer mod available at
http://www.ps-mc.com/. Have fun! Thanks josePhoenix!