--life-like shadows
 

hey guys!
ive spent a while on an office building getting it as realistic as possible (the image below is just one of the many rooms)

my problem is simple. i'd like the shadows emited from the light source to not be so solid and dark. in other words, instead of a solid black colour, i'l prefer a much darker area, but not solid, and preferably with a light blur to its edges.

any suggestions?

feedback on the pic at all?

http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/2807/officeau1.jpg

What shaddows are you using?

If its depth map, try increasing the value of them

If its raytraced then try increasing the number of rays and the light radius.

Or set up aanother light to compensate for the single light casting the shaddows.

The scene looks pretty good, think you should add some extra lights though to bring out the details a bit more.

one thing a lot of people don't realize is that you don't light a scene in maya the way you would go about lighting a regular room... to create the nuances a normal light would create you would have to create several lights with several different settings (and light-linking!), OR you could just cheat and render with mental ray and final gather or those snorefest renderers maxwell or indigo (they take aeons to render a good looking still image, but the renders are pretty good).

What Steve & Neo said just about covers it but you should also set the light source/sources to have a quadratic decay rate. This makes the emitted light look far more realistic.

Cheers,

Mat.

can anyone point my in the direction of a tutorial that shows how to light a room really well??

hey refer to the maya help files (press F1) therell be a good tutorial for lighting and shadows in it :beer:

You can change the intensity of the light.
 

To make the shadow looks lighten in color, you can change the intensity of the light you have created. It should works as i have try before although i am a newbie in maya too.