Volumetric shadows

[IthinkSteve]

I've been trying stuff here and there on SFM and I wanted to play around with volumetric lights.
I've been trying to make it cast shapes like in this picture: https://orig00.deviantart.net/32f0/f/2018/034/2/8/shadows_by_ithinksteve-dc21shp.jpg, which is just what I wanted.
The problem comes once I render a poster which gives me this: https://orig00.deviantart.net/4b62/f/2018/034/4/2/loveshadow1_by_ithinksteve-dc21sh6.png
Now, I would like to know if that's a real problem and if there is a way to make SFM render the poster like in the first picture.
Thank you for the attention

[Zappy]

I'm not sure what the problem here is, other than the first image not being sampled and thus having far "blockier" shadows.

[IthinkSteve]

I would like to know if it's possible to render those square shaped shadows/banding like in the first picture.

[Zappy]

Originally posted by IthinkSteve:

I would like to know if it's possible to render those square shaped shadows/banding like in the first picture.

It is. Disable progressive refinement (as having motion blur, depth of field, and/or anti-aliasing will cause the image to have more than 1 sample, and the more samples an image has, the smoother stuff like volumetric shadows will be).

[Marco Skoll]

I will add however that doing so will massively lower the quality of many other effects and shaders in the image, meaning it may be necessary to render the sections separately and merge them in something like Photoshop.

[episoder]

ugh. this is a volumetric thing? that means you may want to decrease the far offset of the light, so it samples the 'planes' closer together. the farz should be somewhere around your camera. you can enable the light frustum to see where it's at.

[IthinkSteve]

So I have to lower the quality to have that sharp look.
Alright, I just have to figure out how to merge it in a picture.
Thank you all for the help.