www.geocities.com/rhysy2/saturn.jpg
Remeber the dreaded cut and paste !
This is part of a space scene I’m making. Whatever I try, the ring shadow on the planet doesn’t look right - looks like oversampling is off, even though it’s at 16. I’m using the maximum number of samples, highest bias and lowest soft setting. I can upload the .blend file if that’s needed but does anyone know what I might be doing wrong ?
On your lighting, leave the bias at 1.0. I find that I never touch the bias setting at all. Then, set your samples to about 6-7 and then set the soft to double what your samples are set at. This is a good general rule of thumb for spotlights, (i.e. Soft = 2xSamples).
That should help out the AA issues a bit.
If the shadow still doesn’t look all that great, then render the image at 2-3 times the size you want for the final and scale it down in either Photoshop or GIMP to the final size. That always helps as well.
BgDM
Are you using a noise texture? If you are, it’s impossible to Anti-alias it. Instead, use a cloud texture with a very small noise size.
hehe, im just deleting my post since i don’t wanna be wrong 
and the enterprise could be closer to the camera, it really can’t be too big, cos you don’t know what the camera is like (although i may be wrong again 
)
banana
you’re wrong, satellite photos show the dark side of them dark. There is some faint subsurface scattering 
but planets don’t shed light, or they were stars 
90% of photos are taken from Earth or from Hubble, which is nearby Earth and of course shows little or no shadow because Earth is in between Sun and Big Planet
Rysy
Cool planet. I object with lightning. Looks like the main light source is very near to the planet. This I can tel from the Spec on the rings.
Push light further away or push that spec down.
Shadows are insensible to Alpha Maps. And this is a problem for you.
I’d solve your issue by creating a 8/12 vertex circle, parent the spotlight to it and pressing DupliVert. THis creates a bunc of parallel spotlight and the relative shadow is much softer since they do effectively fake an area light
P.S.
have you seen https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9694 ?
Ah, yes,
Enterprise is too big 
Stefano
Firstly… the Enterprise isn’t even going to be there, it’s just testing the water (or the vacuum, whatever) for a much, much better model I’ve nearly finished. So don’t worry about it.
BgDm : Strangely, I seem to get better results with only 1 sample - the shadow doesn’t look very realistic but it doesn’t have such a regular pattern to it. Putting the softness up is not a good idea, because it makes the shadows blurry, and need nice sharp shadows.
RipSting : I’m only using a noise texture on the ring. The planet texture is an image.
S68 : Yes, specularity is wrong, I’ll correct that.
Alpha maps ? I haven’t got any on the planet. Or do you mean the alpha map for the rings ?
How big should this vertex circle be, in comparision with the rest of the scene ? I’ll experiment with this and see what I come up with…and download your ring movie too.
I just downloaded the ring movie and its really cool !