Hi all, have been exploring Superfly for a long time now and as many others (I assume) you constantly run into varies issues that is very frustrating and requires you to spend a lot of time trying to solve them. I have watch a lot of the tutorials posted about Superfly, but to me they always seem to avoid really going into details of how things work, what varies settings do and don't do and in the end it seems that they use the excuse that these issues can be fixed by tweaking settings, but they never seem to do or be able to do this in these tutorials, so even though you get some good information from these, you are still sort of left in the dark and still you are fighting with the same issues over and over. So I thought i would make a post where people can tip in with stuff they have discovered, things they find weird or problems they can't solve and hopefully we can share and maybe even combine all the knowledge that is floating around, as I find it very difficult to find information of how to work with Superfly, the settings and so forth.

So with that said, I decided to have a look at these settings and the Poser spotlight and especially shadows.

To test it I have created a simple scene, which can be seen below:

Its basically a box missing one wall and two windows on each side. A sink and a ball will be the test objects and the light is a single spot using raytrace shadows placed outside the box and shines into the room, the spot light have been changed to Inverse linear. All objects in the scene uses a basic PhysicalSurface material so no settings or textures have be loaded or changed.

I used the High quality preset that comes with Poser for the testing.

So I decided to test the shadow settings for the spot light, the above image have a shadow blur of 1 (Minimum) and 1 Shadow samples (Minimum).

This uses 20 shadow blur (Maximum) and 1 shadow sample (Minimum)

Comparing the two image its clear that Shadow blur have no effect. Increasing the shadow samples have no effect either. The second thing that seems off is the shadows themselves. The shadows casted from the sphere and the sink have no fallout, you would expect the shadows to be softer and less dense at the edge of the shadows, however they appear very sharp and unnatural. Here is a close up of the shadows with shadow blur 20.

The next thing which seems off is the shadow that is casted by the wall with the window from where the spot is shining into the room. The back wall where the sink and sphere is if looking at the corner is very dark, however the wall with the window is lit, even though the light is outside that wall.

Here is a zoomed view of the room.

So my first idea was that it could be caused by light bouncing and since one wall is missing it would appear black. So I added a wall and gave it the same material as the rest and closed off the room.

This is a render from the window opposite the spot.

Which made no difference. Keep in mind that these are rendered with the high quality preset, so you expect the shadows to be correct and its the same with the Ultra high settings.

Now the following renders are using these custom settings.

First of all it seems weird why these high quality presets doesn't use more diffuse bounces, but still even though these bounces are increased how do you control how soft shadows are with a spot light using Superfly?