Attached Link: http://market.renderosity.com/~carrara/tutorials/shadow/clickme.html

Nice write up. Its interesting to see what others have had problems with. I've done similar tests though and not had problems with soft shadows. Although I have had problems as well, but never been a serious issue, I'll have to take a look at some of my renders now and analyze my shadows because of you, I hope you are happy I may find fault in all of my images now, and be scarred of life:( lol. I'm curious though...did you... Did you try repeating renders? Would shifting the light at all improve things? I've been attempting to get good lighting in a scene now, lighting seems the biggest issues with Carrara, and its the most important thing in any image/animation. Well nice write up, it was a good read. cheers, Brian

I did repeat renders and results were identical. Shifting the light would change things. Sometimes better and sometimes worse. Composition is a whole separate issue and I only tried a rather limited set of possible combinations in order to keep the number of tests down to something reasonable yet large enough to explore the issue. Lighting is crucial in most images (real and synthetic). I want people to understand that C can produce really impressive results and knowing what it's doing and how you can manipulate it to make results you want is important. Glad you liked the writeup. -Kix

Very informative, lots of content to absorb, thanks for the effort and research. I tend to use soft shadows frequently in my renders and am always disturbed by the feathering at the contact point between an object and the plane it is casting the shadow on. I also am not quite certain what the function of the "Bias" slider is in the soft shadows menu. Again thanks for the work. memaci

The bias tells C how close to the original object the shadow should start being cast. That's why objects get funky shadow artifacts on them when the bias is set to 0. -Kix