Physical Sun And Sky shadow color?

# 1 02-08-2014 , 07:27 PM

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I'm using the Physical Sun And Sky for a scene and can't figure out how to change the shadow color, my shadows are too dark. Turning the Night Color up all the way to white in mia_physicalsky seems to make my shadows a bit not as strong but it's not enough for what I need. Thanks.

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# 2 02-08-2014 , 08:32 PM

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Try changing the shadow softness to 20-30 and the sample to 32-64............dave

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# 3 02-08-2014 , 09:13 PM

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I don't recall a way to do that(that would take the "physical" out of the physical sky I guess lol). Could you show a screenshot of these too dark shadows?

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# 4 02-08-2014 , 09:41 PM

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daverave's suggestion helps a lot in making the shadows less dark but it also makes them very blurry, I don't think it's realistic. I think the shadows should be pretty much as sharp as the ones in the render with dark shadows but they're just a little too dark. Any other suggestions? Thanks.

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# 5 03-08-2014 , 01:17 AM

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The shadows in the first image look accurate for a clear day, the second looks like there is significant cloud cover. If you want to break the physics then disconnect the physical sun from the directional light and then adjust directional light's shadow color.

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# 6 03-08-2014 , 06:57 PM

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The darkness looks fine to me lol.

Can you play around and find an intermediate with the settings that Dave gave, somewhere in between the two images?

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# 7 03-08-2014 , 10:01 PM

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Yep thewrongvine, that's what I did. Thanks all for the suggestions.

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# 8 16-08-2014 , 07:03 AM

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Another question about the physical sun and sky, not sure if I should open another thread or not for this. I can't figure out how to have my model inside a sphere/dome (for background) and my model to have the exact same lighting as if the sphere/dome was not there. I turn off cast shadows and receive shadows for the sphere and I also disconnect it from sunDirection in the relationship editor and my model is receiving light but there's some really strong shadows.
What am I missing in making the renderer ignore the sphere except for color? Thanks.

edit: I know there's a background option in physical sky but in my experience it either doesn't work or it's very flat, I need a 3d background.

Last edited by madwh; 16-08-2014 at 07:18 AM.

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# 9 16-08-2014 , 09:07 PM

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I blogged about the physical sky and clouds, you could try this method instead.

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# 10 17-08-2014 , 12:29 AM

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Very cool, thanks. I will use that to have clouds texture with the physical sun and sky. What I'm trying to do right now is just have a tiling texture mapped on a sphere for my "sky". The only thing I need from the physical sun and sky setup is the lighting and nothing else, not trying to blend anything. Any idea how I could do that? Thanks.

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# 11 18-08-2014 , 12:27 AM

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In that case you can try using a rayswitch shader, it can allow your textured sphere to be visible without adding more lighting/reflections/refractions whatever.

- Disable cast and receive shadows on background sphere's shape node
- Make a rayswitch shader and assign it to the background sphere
- Make an mia_mat_x shader and kill the diffuse weight
- Make a mia_light_surface texture and plug into it the mia_mat's additional color
- Plug your background texture into the light surface's color, set the reflection contrib to 1 if you want it to show in reflections.
- Drag and drop the mia_mat_x into the rayswitch's eye slot (if you want your background to show up in reflections as specified in the light surface, drop it into the reflection slot as well, if you want the sky to reflect, just drop the physical sky node in instead. Same goes for refraction)

I'm involving the light surface texture here to simulate a Maya software shader with the image mapped to incandescence(hence killing the diffuse weight on the mia_mat). This has the added control over they sky brightness provided by the light surface's intensity. Plus native Maya shaders cause issues with the rayswitch. Hope that helps.

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