Attached Link: http://home.worldonline.se/hellborn/linked_images/lightrig.jpg

The first render has softeness for all lights set to 0.00.
As i think the shadows was to sharp i tried to apply some softness and as sone as the softnes gets above 0.00 the image gets a red tone. Why ?

The last render with a softness of 45.00 has nice shadows but it's grainy. Why?

All renders were done as final renders.

The scene it's put inside is the nolightscene scene from the tutorial at www.nggali.com

Attached Link: http://home.worldonline.se/hellborn/linked_images/LightRig.vue

Forgot the link to the scene if anyone want's it.

I looked at your scene. The introduction of the red color is a bug. I would definitely turn this over to e-onsoftware's tech support for review and repair.

To get a smooth render, try the Ultra render setting or a User setting with anti-aliasing with max quality and 8+ rays per pixel.

I did a sample render, and I get the exact same problem with soft shadows. Red is introduced into the scene.

Charles

OK I have filed a report to e-on.

Hi HellBorn, Regarding graininess of shadows with high "soft" values: you'll need a lot of supersampling to get them look smooth. Final is not enough. You'll need to crank up the anti-aliasing settings to about 12 subrays per pixel, and at least 75% quality threshold. Most images, though, look better with full quality threshold (i.e. "best") even with less subrays to save some render time. For digital images (i.e. web), I usually render at "best" quality threshold and 9 subrays per pixel, but at a higher resolution that is needed. Rescale the image in your image application, and you should get quite nice soft shadowing. Hope this helps, -Sascha.rb

Very nice shadows, hope you will continue this work !

I did not render at anything more time consuming than final because I wanted the graininess to be visible. As you can se there is no graininess in the first picture. Why no? Why does it start to appear when I add softness? It's mostly of curiosity. Did I do something wrong, is it a bug or is it supposed to be like that when softness is added. I did this setup because I like it for rendering of models i build. As it gives a greyscale image, has lighting that shows the shape well and it has no distracting colors. By the way.. Thanks for the nolightscene scene nggalai.

Hi HellBorn, yes--soft shadows are pretty grainy in Vue. And as those shadows "shade" your object through self-shading, the whole image may appear grainy. I'll try out your .vue file to see whether I can echo your issue. later, -Sascha.rb

You're welcome (the nolight-scene). :) OK, tried it out--weird indeed, but very nice rig. :D Turning up the brightness fixed it, though. Which makes me speculate: It might be that you're hitting some render precision threshold with your 104 dim light sources. I experienced a similar problem when trying to shade a scene with very dim light sources--colour banding, and with additional lights, colour cancellation and augmentation occured. Adding softness spread the "colour error" so far that it tinted the scene itself. Might be much the same here--there's so many "dark" lights illuminating the scene, that it's probable that you're hitting an internal precision limit of Vue's . . . well, I'm looking forward to the reply by e-on, until then it's just guesswork. Regarding softness: a value of 45 is very, very high and will take a long time to render at a decent quality setting as proposed in my first post here. Hence, the graininess. You'll only get rid of it (but not completely) by using an excess amount of anti-aliasing. With 104 soft shadows, rendering will take ages, I'd guess. I did a trial render at 320x200, and it already took a full 15 minutes--with nothing but a sphere in it. ta, -Sascha.rb