Dusty Area Light Shadow
 

http://pic18.picturetrail.com/VOL906.../112409597.jpg

1. I have an area light on the left, and a point light on the right.
Raytrace Shadows for the area light is turned on.
It was rendered with raytracing turned on as well.

What I get is a patch of noisy shadow cast by the ball. How is it that I can make it more natural?
(I have the spot light throw a shadow and it doesn't have the noisy shadow. )

2. Since the area light & point light are shining from behind the wooden ball, how come there's still light that got inside the ball?

3. On the surface of the wooden ball, there's actually a separate surface with a material to simulate glass. It's just a plain surface. I want to create depth to it so that when I shin e the light at it, it can show some refractions of the inner wood. How should I go about increasing the thickness of the glass?

With number 3 this is just a stab in the dark, but why not try Bump Mapping it? Just convert the texture to gray scale in Photoshop or something and apply it as a bump map, just change the bump map depth to how natural u want it to look