light_reflection_antialiasing

[edgar_cg]

Hello,

I am trying to render an interior image of a hall that has a skylight above it. The light should then reflect in the floor. I am trying to have this light faded in the floor to not have sharp shadows. I increased to size of the light to have this effect working, but what is doing right now, is actually fading the light that is closer, but the light that is in the background is actually very sharp and does not have any anti-aliasing.
I am posting the settings, as well. Any idea of what I could be doing wrong?

I am using IM for the first bounce and LC for the second. It is taking ages (for bad quality). Any other suggestion to decrease rendering time? (QMC does not bring enought light to the scene)

Thanks as always

[dalomar_cg]

Re: light_reflection_antialiasing

Well as far as having softer shadows you'll need to increase the size of the sun even more (10-15 usually works for me). There are a few things with your AA settings that seem a bit off. First is the setting that you're using for the Area filter. I'm not sure exactly what a size of .01 will actually do (sharpening I assume, but I don't think Area is good for sharpening), but my indication is that its not good, and possibly causing a few of the AA artifacts that you're seeing in the distance. My general advice is to not even have an AA filter (unless its for a final render) because it will generally introduce artifacts or blur the final result, and almost always increase the render time. Also your Threshold in your AA settings is very low, and I've found that below .01 there really isn't too much of a noticeable difference.

As far as you're IR settings, I would flip those around, meaning that I would lower your max rate (to -1) and add more H.Subdivisions. In the end the calculation should wind up taking about the same amount of time, but that time will be spent on having more refined samples (due to higher h.subd) then simply more samples.

If you're still finding that the calculations are still taking a little longer then you would like, then you should try enabling Clamp Output and Subpixel Mapping which are both in the Color Mapping rollout. The only downfall to this is that you won't have anymore of your color information beyond white.