How do you get soft Shadows when Raytracing?

# 1 07-04-2003 , 08:53 PM

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How do you get soft Shadows when Raytracing?

This is a scene I have been working on. Notice the hard shadows underneath the cars. How do I soften these up? They are ray traced...not Dmaps. Any other suggestions welcomed and how to improve this scene and look. Thanks.

BTW...I would use Dmaps but the shadows are hosed. I have adjusted the Res to match the render output i.e. 640 x 480. So I raytrace.

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# 2 07-04-2003 , 09:28 PM

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You want to look at both the light radius and shadow rays attributes. In a nutshell, adjusting the light radius will give you your soft shadows. The Shadow rays attribute controls the sampling of the shadows (kind of like the dmap filter).

"Terminat Bora Diem, Terminal Auctor opus."

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# 3 07-04-2003 , 09:48 PM

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Btw, here's a quick example I just did for you with a sphere, ground plane (a cube actually) and a spotlight. I left the raytracing defaults in render globals and in the spotlight's attributes, it's setup like this:

no decay
cone angle 40
penumbra 10
dropoff: 0

raytraced shadows on:

Light radius: 2.009
shadow rays: 10
depth limit: 1

You should experiment with lower values....increasing radius or rays will slow your rendering, even for simple scene such as the one I did.

"Terminat Bora Diem, Terminal Auctor opus."

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# 4 07-04-2003 , 09:49 PM

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Ewps, forgot the attachment (hit the wrong button). Here it is.

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# 5 07-04-2003 , 11:00 PM

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Thank you for the advice and example. However, I am using 4 directional lights so what are the parameters for soft shadows with them. Thanks.

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# 6 07-04-2003 , 11:41 PM

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Directional lights have the same raytrace shadow attributes as the spotlights. Adjust the same settings I mentioned.

"Terminat Bora Diem, Terminal Auctor opus."

Last edited by NitroLiq; 07-04-2003 at 11:43 PM.

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# 7 07-04-2003 , 11:47 PM

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Here's another example using the same settings as before except this has a directional light rather than a spotlight.

"Terminat Bora Diem, Terminal Auctor opus."

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# 8 10-04-2003 , 12:57 AM

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Thanks man. I got it to work. I have a new problem now so check for my next posting.

Cheers

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# 9 10-04-2003 , 05:57 AM

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Hey, i really like your render there, thats a great scene... i would definately tone down the lighting a bit though, it makes it look a bit fake because it shows ALL the details with that much light, the less light, can sometimes be the best thing user added image