soft shadows

[Robken]

as far as I know Dmap always gives you hard shadows.

you can use raytracing to create soft shadows. this will lengthen your rendertime, but has much better effects.

don't forget to turn on raytracing in your render globals aswell.
you'll have to tweak around the sliders that are hidden under the raytracing tab of the lightattributes though. it's somewhat trial and error in that department :)

[mimo8]

thnx for fast reply

meanwhile I played with the normal Dmap shadows and seeing that the dmap filter size does creat soft shadows in a artificial way. dmap shadows are like bitmaps that are just put over the objects in the right way - that is why you can store them. the dmap filter just blures the edges of this bitmap.

that is my conclusion so far.
any correction would increase my knowledge :D

[neods]

Hey Mimo, I've seen you in the Cinema4d forum. How is maya? do you like it? i've been thinking of changing to maya because cinema still lacks some stuff. Do you think that you will become a maya user?

Thanks

[thematt]

mimo8 if you look for soft shadow you MUST go check on pixho.com..it has tons of thing related to rendering.

A must see.

welcome to maya world

cheers


www.pixho.com

[mimo8]

thnx thematt for the link

neods:
definitely yes!
maya is not as handy as c4d, but it rules - I have time at the moment to learn it - an it takes some time to cover all the features ( or lets better say to get an idea of the possibilitys)

I started to check out maya now, because I am about to start a short movie, character animation.
I did CA in cinema and it just lacks many things.
soft IK is slow in editor window, it takes a lot of time t set up a good rig and structuring the controllers is rather impossible.
there are some usefull pluggins for cinema - like visual selector - (still talking bout character animation) but you got to pay for them.

when I unpacked final rig ( a free pluggin to setup characteres with a visual selector built in) I knew I would swith.

this is exactly what I needed - and no secondary apps like motionbuilder etc neede.
motionbuilder is top - no doubt. but I like the idea that with maya you have everything under one roof.

I am still playing with the PLE - but as I am still a student I will go for a student version as soon as the I take up the work on this movie ( still waiting a bit for when maya 5.5 comes out)

maya can be rather wicked when u go into detail and even deeper - it seems endless. also when you want to cover every feature - but lets face it - who knows all the photoshopfeatures.

so taking what you need is not that complicated, maya is not the messy monster I expected. and the comunity rocks.

the platform here covers every question (that you dont find in the help ; )
and all this great other pages like learningmaya or highend3D make it BIIIIG.

when you don´t know maya this mel thing does not seem too impotant. I also compared it to the scripting abilities in cinema. but as maya is through and through based on mel, the pluggins (that are actualy no pluggins but scripts that you execute) are really fat.

shaders, auto rigging plugggins, etc. are realy top noch and FREEE. this is quite different in cinema cause the worldwide comunity is not so big. that does not mean that this scipts stay on a text level. once executed they open up a graficval interface, from some basic buttons till really smooth stuff.

I love cinema and it is great when it is about visualisation, stills or simple animatons - I realy miss the renderengine - mental ray is great but difficult and slow.

as a conclusion I would say: switch when you are interested in character, particles, fur and cloth, but stay when you do web - stills, design and co.

maya also is interesting cause it is so widespread - not only for working for companies but also for colaborating with other artists to creat movies together ... its a bit like the language we use here : )


hope my resume helped u - go ahead if you have any more questions

[Sentenza]

Didn't give you those settings here a nice soft shadow effect ?

http://a.domaindlx.com/Sentenza/SoftShadows.jpg

Use the Decay Settings ...
switch on the depht map shadows ...
play around with the settings for the penumbra angle and change the dropoff value ...

I think here you go ...
Ah ... If you turn on a Decay you have to increase the intensity of your light ...

[LennO]

Originally posted by mimo8
thnx for fast reply

meanwhile I played with the normal Dmap shadows and seeing that the dmap filter size does creat soft shadows in a artificial way. dmap shadows are like bitmaps that are just put over the objects in the right way - that is why you can store them. the dmap filter just blures the edges of this bitmap.

that is my conclusion so far.
any correction would increase my knowledge :D

"filter size does create soft shadows in a artificial way" isn't correct. THAT is what soft shadows are, and it's the same in cinema. You can create area shadows using raytraced shadows and palying with the light radius attribute in maya.

[lazzhar]

Soft Shadows that are produced by Area lights with Raytracing could be rendered by using multi spots. ie you could start with one spot with 0.25 intensity that cast shadow map of 256 resolotion then duplicate it and move it just a litle bit, and redo till you get 4 spot lights. It will gives you an effect simillar to what you expect from Aera light but it renders faster.
That's how Professional work with Renderman in production.

[Brent Turbo]

Originally posted by LennO
"filter size does create soft shadows in a artificial way" isn't correct. THAT is what soft shadows are, and it's the same in cinema.

Yes and no. That is the way that soft shadows are calculated in Cinema, but it is an artificial way to arrive at a blurred shadow. With one light and dmaps, it is impossible to have a shadow that is crisp near the base of an object, and then blurs as it spreads away from the object. The most realistic, of course, are ray traced shadows, but honestly who wants to wait for those to render?

Mimo8, there is a better way! Now's the time to start building your own custom light rigs that you can just drop into a scene as needed....

Create an array of, say, 12 spotlights, and have them all pointed in the same direction, or if your're fancy, have them all aimed at a locator. Use a small-ish depth map for each of these lights. Maybe 128 or less will do the trick. Now turn up your dmap filter size to around 4. That blurs the depth maps. Oh, and turn the intensity down on all these lights to where they all add up to around 1! (You can group these lights together and add custom attributes to control things like color, intensity and shadow settings for all the lights at once, which is fun)

Play around with the dmap size and filter amount for these lights, and I think you'll wind up with something that's every bit as good looking as raytraced shadows, and often times has a more interesting quality to the shadows, due to the slight overlaps in areas.

Regards,
Brent

EDIT: Lazzhar got in there before me, hehe... He's right, an area light/raytraced will never be used in production.

[mimo8]

thank you guys - I did not expect so much and also so profund answeres.

you know, coming from another software package you want to perform a simple thing and realise it is not possible - thats what you think first. then you dig into it ( with a little help from your online friends) and realise that maya is not unable to do so, but it is much more precise and gives you full controll over the specific task.

that is the thing that makes maya so interesting once you got in - it teaches you the backround of 3D and doesnt leave you with standard settings.
during the last 3 weeks learning maya taught me a lot about cg.

so. I will stop my hymn here and check out the proposals you gave me - thnx guys

[Brent Turbo]

Mimo8, I am a Cinema4d convert, as well, and I know exactly what you're talking about, although I do very much enjoy working in Cinema from time to time. Let me know if you have any Cinema to Maya questions in future....

Brent

[mimo8]

just finished my softshadow experiments and I am rather sattisfied.
here is my latest output
http://www.xdv.org/mmm/download/data/softshadows.jpg

thnx to Brent Turbo and lazzhar
here is the file:
softshadow.mb (http://www.xdv.org/mmm/download/data/softshadows.mb)
:thumbsup:

[mimo8]

made a little rotation movie out of it
just for fun and just 750k :D
let the good times rotate (http://www.xdv.org/mmm/download/data/rotorsculpt.mov-pjpeg%204.mov)

[Pixero]

For nice soft shadows that are distance dependent:

1. Turn on raytrace shadows.
2. Set light radius to a value like 2. (Bigger = blurrier)
3. Up the number of shadow rays for a less noisy look.
(You can use a low value for previews and up it for final rendering.)

Works with both Maya native renderer and Mental Ray.

http://w1.702.comhem.se/~u70208061/bilder/pics/softshadow01.jpg

[thematt]

Yes and no. That is the way that soft shadows are calculated in Cinema, but it is an artificial way to arrive at a blurred shadow. With one light and dmaps, it is impossible to have a shadow that is crisp near the base of an object, and then blurs as it spreads away from the object. The most realistic, of course, are ray traced shadows, but honestly who wants to wait for those to render?

___________________________________________________

You really think so ? :wip:

Did you check the link I put earlier, like I say pixho has a great way of doing that right inside maya..this has been explain on the Maya master class rendering by Tom kluysken..it's a really neat trick and it's way faster that raytracing..

Anyway just do it the way you like, at least you know it's possible.

cheers



btw if ever you do it in raytracing just switch to mental ray it's like 5 time faster..hehe:applause:

[Pixero]

The Pixho trick with depthmap softshadows is great but doesnt work well if you have multiple objects that are at different distances from the light.

[lazzhar]

Originally posted by mimo8
....

......... - I realy miss the renderengine - mental ray is great but difficult and slow.
....



Hi mimo8
I'm just wondering how is that? I dont feel that Mental Ray is slow at all.
There is a big comparaison here between Mental Ray and PRMan(of Pixar) by someone that works for ILM calld "gga" and he's saying that MR is faster than PRMan i Scanline rendering, and we dont talk about Raytracing where MR is the fastest therefore it's the fastest too in GI /AO/FG and kinda stuff.
And dont forget that many Studios are switching ti MR in their production, remember Matrix Reloaded(dunno about eh last one) and the next film Shark Slayer will be completly rendered in Mental Ray.
-laz

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.