I was piddling around and got an idea based off of a realization that I had a long time ago. The edges of shadows aren't perfect edges, they are blury. The reason is because light sources aren't points. It would be neat to have a new kind of light source that maybe would be implemented using many point lights say in a tetrahedron of which you could specify the resolution and radius of the geometry. I did a little experimenting by organizing several lights in a plane and the resulting shadows were rather pleasing when ray traced, but doing it this way can be rather cumbersome. Which also led to my noticing that light sources cannot be cloned. I would imagine that a plug in could create a "macro" light source.

I guess you are talking about pov ? I don't use pov any more but isn't there a "softshadow" option that could be set ?

I don't really get to into POVray, which you are correct, that's what I use. I just let 3D Canvas handle it. There may be a softshadow option but your wording makes it sound like it would be a global thing, whereas in complex lighting scenes the softness of a shadow varies. Another idea I had (when I was reading up on DX9 D3D pipeline) was to have an emissive color property for materials. DX9 actually supports emissive materials, but POVray would have a much heavier task because it would also be expected to affect lighting in the rest of the scene (which DX does not). Though it may not be needed, it is another step towards realism (and flexibility) which, at least for me, is the main goal.

What I meant (and I stress this is just guess work, but not knowing anything about a subject has never stopped me before ) is if there is such a thing as a "softshadow" option in pov then maybe Amabilis could add a "tick in the box" for the light properties box - as you said if this is only a global option then it is not much use - but I am guessing that pov would have an option for each light ?