As to my thoughtless idea on having multiple mainlights,,, that creates a new set of rogue shadows that need to be tuned down and out of the non shadowed area (In this box test). Bias has to lower too.  Big pita in a dark scene but good I think for studio lights.

Increasing the light distance helps obviously but with SM spots means raising the map size to avoid breakup and costs in rendertime.

Can someone please direct me to information about the Inverse Square Falloff node setup for lights? I did a forum search but I'm not convinced I found the best setup.

one second

www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

great shader.

Thanks ice-boy.

So I just have to remember to input the correct reference and light position into the nodes - Poser needs a built in version of this for sure so we don't have to enter these extra values (gets tricky with lots of lights as I'm using a fake area-light array).

Biting my tongue. Biting my tongue. Biting my tongue.

Sooooo.........I think I may hold off adding lots of nodes to all my lights (maybe just play a little). Ahem
I'd be surprised if you have a tongue left by the time P8 actually gets released.

i am still searching for some papers for fast soft raytraced shadows. i found two.
could this be in the future in poser?  bagginsbill you are the expert. what do you think? could this work with firefly?
artis.inrialpes.fr/Publications/2005/LAALA05/SoftShadowVolumesRT.pdf
www.tabellion.org/et/paper07/egsr07_mtsm.pdf

faster shadows are always good right he he :) 

If we abandon displacement, yes these could be made to work. (Notice that Kerkythea, last I looked, did not support displacement but does support some very advanced lighting models.)

I'm actually not an expert on Firefly - stewer is. You should ask him. I know about some of its limitations, but I've never seen the code. I know, for example, that reflections don't track displaced surfaces correctly, but displacement was there first. Obviously adding ray-tracing to a REYES renderer is a compromise.

But there is no reason they should stick with Firefly. I really don't care too much what the renderer is and would be happy to use several dozen. What I don't want to deal with is several dozen different models for materials.

aha i understand.

i am still suprised that after 10 years there are no mroe information on shadows that are fast as DM shadows and realistic as raytraced.
i guess it is hard to combine them together.

my shadows settings are:   raytraced,blur 20 and bias 0.8 .

IIRC, increase your bias.

Sometimes smoothing forces you to use a larger bias than you want. Do you have smoothing on? If so, disable it on the prop, so you can keep smoothing other things, and see what happens.

if i disable smoothing on ground its the same.

i modeled this myself and its not textured yet so i can change the model. should i model it in a special way? 

I don't know. I'm not much of a modeler. So far, what models I've made, I've not seen what you've got there.

Upon looking more closely, I see that all of the polygons are outlined, even the ones far away.

Are they welded? They should be. Are they double sided? They should not be.

i imported in blender now and made it not double sided and also used welded .

its the same.

thanks for the help. but i guess its just a bug or something.