Quick question: When you enable the soft shadows setting to an omni light, is the amount it softens the shadows, related to the size of the light? Or does the soft shadow render thing already have a preset size from which it radiates the lights from? Or do I make any sense at all? (for example, could you create a fake HDRI image by just stretching a sphere width and length wise over the entire sky, then applying soft shadows, or would it still act (shadow wise) as if it's all coming from the original size of the light. I did this experiment once, and I can't remember what happened. (and does it make a difference whether you select soft shadows in the lightlab or the render settings window?

Uh...that's not what HDRI is at all... HDRI is using a High Dynamic Ranged Image to create cool reflections and stuff... Yeah, it does make a difference. Soft shadows in the light lab softens them a lot more than just clicking soft shadows, because it can soften each individual shadow that particular light casts. The light lab just tries to soften up the edges of the shadows a little, as i understand it. Someone who knows what they're talking about can correct me...please.

cool. Yeah. Forget HDRI. Typo. I was just talking to someone about it and had the word on the brin.

No, the size of an omni light has not effect on the illumination, with or without SS. The "size" of the SS is determined by each lights Hard/Soft setting in it's Light Lab. As near as I can tell and subject to correction :-), if all the lights have an SS value of 0 (hard), turning on SS in the Render Options does nothing to the render at all except slow it down - when it's on the renderer checks to see if there's any SS light rays it needs to deal with and if no lights have any it's just wasting CPU cycles. One SS trick that been mentioned a couple of times - the Normal AA render setting actually takes longer to render SS then using the "Premium" 16RPP/SS (and with much better quality!). HTH; Dan

Actual soft shadows are calculated from the origin point of the light, the size of the light object has no value in this matter. The degree of softness is determined by a relationship between the shadow receiving point and the shadow casting point from the lights point of view. The hardness/softness setting determines the extent to which increasing distance in the above relationship drives a softening of the shadows. This describes what I have found the process to be.

One further item is that sometimes ss don't seem to work if you are using a sky preset other that the default. Quite often in that case I would create a closed space light stage and work solely with individual lights inside that stage.