Tonight, I added some quick and dirty soft shadows to Stained.  This had two effects:

1. It made the sphere in the scene look more realistic by effectively diffusing them.
2. It made the stained glass look more realistic by mixing some colors together while keeping some splashes of rich colors.

To accomplish this feat, I added some code to sample in the 6 basic directions relative to my light source, since technically my light source is not a point source, and has width, height, and depth, as well as the center point.  So these 7 checks I added are done in a loop in my shadow function, including the center point of the light, of course.  Normally, you would want to randomly sample dozens of these points, and probably in a greater number than 7, but this was fast and effective enough to create the basic desired effect in real-time in this case.

I’m actually really happy with the amount of improvement this one little adjustment has made to the scene.

Here’s the live shader (loads fastest in Chrome):