Quote - If I understand what I have read, more of the inner workings of Poser/Firefly are exposed to Pytho and wxPython scripts in Poser 8. Undoubtedly as script writters get familiar with these new capabilities they will offer more power to the users.

Please explain (briefly and simply if possible) Shadow Blur and Shadow Samplesused with Raytracing. What kind of render times is one talking about with high and low Shadow Samples? How will these settings interact with IDL?

LMK

Raytraced shadow blur is used to create soft edges on the shadows. Normally, a raytraced shadow is a single ray from the shaded point to the light. If anything gets in the way, that light is blocked and doesn't contribute luminance. To implement blur, more than one ray is sent, in a cone, towards the light. The amount of shadowing is then proportional to the fraction of these rays that do or do not hit something on their way to the vicinity of the light. In other words, the light is treated as a disk instead of a point, and multiple sections of the disk are sampled.

The problem with this approach is that the exact position of these samples is a bit non-deterministic. Slight variations can cause the same cone ray to hit or miss, because the cone rays from adjacent rendered points are not laid out identically. This produces a sort of random probability that ray #x will hit in one spot, and miss in another very close spot, producing a random smattering of shadow speckles. By using more rays, you're getting a better statistical sample, so you're less likely to get the speckles.

More samples adds to render time. For simple objects, it isn't much time - maybe a few seconds. For complex objects and objects with transparency, it could add a lot of time, so you want to use it sparingly. However, now that we can get better realism, this sort of thing matters. As I've said before, I'm not happy to render for 10 hours, but an overnight render that looks fantastic is preferable to a 1 hour render that does not look fantastic.

I do not have time at the moment to do extensive testing, so I can't say how this really affects IDL. I doubt it matters to IDL whether the shadow is smoothly blurred or not.

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