All,

This may be more of a POV question, but maybe you guys can shed some light
on this... (no pun intended)... I've been trying to get "softer" shadows in
my renders by creating a reflection dish for a point light. I've also been
playing around with "lenses" made from meshes with "interior" turned on to
make them "bend" light. I don't know much about the photons feature of POV,
but I thought it was meant to more accurately simulate reality, or the real
behavior of light refracting through glass and reflecting from mirrors. How
come when I set these things up (if I've even done so properly - see below),
they have little to no effect on how the point light lights the scene? I've
even tinkered with radiosity, but that doesn't even seem to affect the
shadows cast by the point light at all.

BTW, I know this issue has been "addressed" by "area" lights with "jittered"
shadows, or whatever the term is... but that seems so "fake" to me -
shouldn't ray-tracing be able to more accurately simulate "real-life" light
behavior? Shouldn't I be able to model the components of a real-world
spotlight and have it behave the same way? Why is this not working?

Also BTW... it would be really nice to have some basic help system for the
various settings in the radiosity and photon tabs in the Scene Settings
dialog box - maybe in the form of tool tips - to let one know generally what
the various settings are doing. They all have arcane names that are familiar
to programmers, I suppose, but for the average lay person, such as myself,
their meanings can only be guessed at. Some kind of description of each
setting built into Moray would help me know what settings I should place to
achieve the effect I'm after (ie: "When you set the ADC Bailout high it does
this, but when you set it low it does that." or some-such.) I know there is
general help on this in Moray's help (which is broken on my setup, BTW -
gives an error on my fresh install of 3.5 shareware - probably just my IE's
Java setup is bad...) on these settings tabs, but something built in to be
"live" while I'm making the adjustments would be great!

Just some thots for discussion...

-Kman

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