Ok, I've been trying some of this using the Doberman. Again, I'm just kinda guessing about the quality thing because its only a slider, but it is clear that best quality is needed if the soft shadow is important. However, the dog looks quite good to me at lower settings and I can't imagine too many times I'm going to be casting a soft shadow on a plain flat surface. Really, I hardly even turn on soft shadows. The noise from background stuff and surface textures easily masks pixelation flaws in them, so I think its more a matter of matching the right kind of render to the right kind of scene and this 'acid test' for shadows is one factor to consider.

I do now realize that Ultra doesn't even enable soft shadows so no wonder they look so bad with that setting.

Now I'm really not sure what the lighting set up others are using is. I just used the plain "blank" sky and the sun, moving the sun so it would cast a shadow off the dog similar to sitting blues (I only used one dog though) and made the ground flat white. I made the sun 30% soft and with all the render settings maxed out it took just over 8 minutes. Granted, we didn't use the same animal and stuff but 8 minutes versus almost 2 hours for Nightvoice? Something seems wacky there. I have a 1.7gz p4, but I can't imagine the difference between a 1gz and a 1.7gz it THAT huge (btw I don't use openGL either for the same reasons, plus imported Poser figures often looked weird with gl on for me anyway and it made it hard to position them).

Maybe if someone could make a "test scene" with the stuff that comes with Vue we can do some real benchmarking tests to get an idea of how different systems perform. At least then the results would have some meaning and people could get an idea of what Vue likes. We did that with a Poser scene a while back and the results were quite informative.

Regardless, this has prompted me to spend some time with the render settings and I feel like I understand them better now. So if nothing else, that's one good thing! :)