final gather simple shadows problem

[blarg]

hi,

i got quite a problem here with a pretty simple render. unfortunately i am pretty noob, so maybe sb can help me solve this.

http://home.arcor.de/scripples/shadows_suck.jpg

as you can see, the dropshadows below the frames are very unrealistic, though the frames touch the wall they look disconnected. i guess the main problem is, that the shadows dont go to the corners.

my lighting i just a big plane with a constant from above, and a small fill from below. my problem lessens, when i crank up the number of rays to 2000 - weird thing is, the shadows are near perfect, when i see it is calculating fg in status bar, then, when it says rendering it smears it all :-(

can anybody give me a hint?

thanks

[cryptosporidium]

im my opinion its bcs you have small resolution of final gather. FG points are too far from each other and the rest is aproximated so everything is blurred. try reduce sampling contrast for final gather and/or increase number of rays.

edit: but 2000 rays seems to be far too much for this kind of scene... can you post printscreen of your FG settings?

[thiago]

you can plug an ambient occlusion shader in the wall to make it render a contact shadow between the frames and the wall.

in the rendertree: nodes>illumination>ambient occlusion

FG can make contact shadows like you want but what happens is that you'll need lots and lots of rays, and tweak your FG settings a lot to get more visible shadows...
Better to just throw an XSI Ambient Occlusion on that shader and you are done.