Soft Shadows. Did Vue 6 do anything about rendering those soft shadows. Remember in Vue 5 how they took forever to render soft shadows and they only rendered smooth in Superior render mode. I would love it If someone could render a cylinder or a simple object with soft shadows, in Vue 5 and the exact same scene in Vue 6. I would love to see the difference. Thanks

In Vue6, you have more control over soft shadows. You can increase or decrease the softness quality, in much the same way you change AA parameters in Vue5. Using the new automatic AA ( different from Vue5), and a little texture filtering, soft shadows render faster.

I sure agree with Bruno!
In Vue 6 Infinite there is now a lot of control over soft shadows.
For instance, the custom softness edit feature in the Light & Shadow editor is very nice - and fast.

Check out these rather realistic shadows:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1320365

What are your AA settings? What type of atmosphere are you using? Is there a lot of ambient light?

I would never use one of the default render settings for soft shadows, only the custom 'User' render settings. Then check 'Enable super-sampling' and 'Soft shadows', with as much OAA (Object Antialiasing) as needed - by testing.

They can help, as testing standards only (as in this thread), or for beginners, but sometimes make it difficult to achieve the results you want in a reasonable render time. Best to use custom settings with a screen dump image of the render settings screen you used.

The 'Advanced effects quality'  Edit button might also help, since you can customize your scene sampling parameters in their, if you are doing GI or GR lighting types. Default high quality render setting, like 'Superior', include several enabled settings you probably don't need, but which will require long render times.

My feeling is that the default render settings are set by the developers (by necessity) for an "average scene" to achieve some "average" quality level.

If you don't care about keeping render times down and you want your scenes to look average - sure go ahead and use those default render settings.  If you want the best possible results in the least possible render time, you have to learn the render settings - by reading the manual and using the excellent help text. 

My belief is that every image is unique and therefore requires a unique set of carefully crafted render settings - if the image is important to you.

Great advice here, Jim.

Now I tested the default shadow maps.

There must be some ambient light. Check the atmo editor, and look for the light balance, and see how much (%) ambient light there is as opposed to sun light. Ambient light produces more grainy shadows. As Jim said, it is better to use your own render settings. Imho, final and superior AA settings are never sufficient. personnaly I use the automatic AA, min9, max9, with the quality slider set to 60%.

Shadows over a flat white surface or a light coloured surface will always need more AA than on a darker coloured surface, with bump.

I've got to agree with Bruno and Jim.  If you want good results and the fastest render times you've got to go with custom settings based on how the scene is set up.  Why turn on caustics and transparancy if there isn't anything in the scene that uses them?

I have the texture anti-aliasing turned-off and have set the object anti-aliasing to:

min: 12 sub-rays and max: 36.

Upping the maximum sub-rays improved the quality of the render. I tried 12, 24, and 48 max sub-rays. With 12 max sub-rays, the quality of the render was equal to the Superior render mode. With 24 max sub-rays, the quality was better, but still grainy. With 48 sub-rays the quality was equal to 36 sub-rays. So I believe the sweet spot for maximum sub-rays is: > 24 and <= 36 (at least, for soft-shadows).

An interesting note, the Vue 5 renders for 36 and 48 sub-rays were only one second apart. While the Vue 6 renders for 48 sub-rays took an extra minute over the 36.

Lastly, in Vue 6, I set the object Anti-aliasing Strategy to 'Soft'. This is a new control and is found in the ' Anti-aliasing Options' dialogs (Render Options dialog / Anti-aliasing group / Edit button). I believe that's why the Vue 6 render took longer, but finished better than the Vue 5.

In the Atmosphere editor, the slider is set to 100% sunlight. The light color is white and the ambient color is black. This scene is one of my oldest scenes dating back to Vue 4.

In my last post I have set the Advanced effect quality to 100% and the Quality threshold to 100%.

Has anyone tried to use the postwork options on shadows? If so does it work well? This is when a person enables the G-buffer / Multi-Pass buffer.

It could save a lot of time, using with the rendered PSD shadow layer and Photoshop to create soft and grain-free shadows.

Anybody want me to test the G-Buffer option? This would be a first for me.

Yes, sittingblue, using the  shadow layer in  PS has to be a huge time saver, haven't tried it myself, though.