Maya depth map shadows are rendered wrong
 

Hi there. I am (still) a novice and trying get to grips with Maya. Sometimes I hit a snag but tend to overcome it after some googling but this one is sticking...

I am following a lighting tutorial but after playing around, this happens when I use Depth Map Shadows. I have deleted all my lights and reset Mental Ray to both preview and production but I still get the "scetch" effect. I have tried diffirent settings in both my Penumbra and Dropoff settings.

http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/663...pthmapshad.jpg

When I use Ray Trace shadows, it works. (Just a quick render to show it does.)

http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/327...wsraytrace.jpg

I hope someone can help, its really anoying and frustrating atm, but I want to puch through but dont want to start all over, I think it might be something in the level, not the lights...
Thank you in advance!

Software
Windows XP SP3
Maya 8.0

System Specs
Intel E8500
Geforce GTX 285 (Driver ver : 180.87)
4GB System Ram

With depth map shadows you have to understand that fiddling with the resolution, filtersize or bias of the shadow can give strange results when rendering.
I don't remember exactly in what way it connects to each other since i haven't done depth map shadows in a while.
But googling or pressing F1 will help you i think, it did once for me

Good luck

Hi,

I believe like mastone said it's down to filter size and map size. With depth map shadows the light basically projects a texture into the scene and creates a shadow map based on it. If the texture is too small then you will get stepped edges, unless you use a larger filter size (which will blur the stepped edges together, simulating soft shadows). If you want sharp shadows you need to use a larger map size but with a lower filter.

So small map + high filter = soft shadow edges.

Large maps = sharper shadows.

Hope that helps,

cheers

gubar

You guys are but struggling to get the shadows to render correctly...

Thanks guys!!!