Why is the shadowing all speckled instead of a nice smooth shadow?
Boat.blend (267 KB)
It looks like you are using Raytrace Ambient Occlusion.
Try switching to Approximate.
Is this the setting you are suggesting i switch to? (it was on raytrace)
If so, it did not change very much.
but thanks for the instantaneous response!
You could try increasing the samples on your lights and/or your gather samples (if you go back to raytrace).
Even when using Approximate gather, if you have soft lights you need to increase the sample amount for the lamp in order to get smooth shading. The shading samples doesn’t have to be anywhere near what you’d need for raytracing, but make sure you’re at least a 4 for the soft lamps, maybe more.
EDIT: Just noticed you provided a blend file. In your case, you only have 4 samples for your Raytrace Gather. I increased that to 12 (which slows down the render a fair amount) and that smoothed out the shadows.
Oops – you’re right. I also upped the samples for the lamp. Here’s a render with both the gather and the lamp set to 8 samples; you could up this until it’s as smooth as you want it; already takes a rather long time to render, though!
A-ha! that did it.
Thank you very much!