CGTalk - GI + Soft shadows on background shader = Possible?

View Full Version : GI + Soft shadows on background shader = Possible?

fr3drik

06-08-2004, 06:58 PM

I have this simple ball on an imaginary floor (background shaded), bouncing around. I put a pointlight in the scene with raytracing on, emit photos on, area light on. I also made sure render globals had caustics, GI and FG activated.

However, my shadow isn't soft at all. It looks like if it was a solid black shadow on 10% opacity with a razor sharp border.

Help! What am I doing wrong? :cry:

Powell

06-08-2004, 07:34 PM

GI and FG dont work with background shaders. You can usually fake the FG shadows with a couple area lights and raytraced shadows....:thumbsup:

fr3drik

06-08-2004, 08:46 PM

Thanks for the reply, I've been struggling with this for the last six hours. I was just about to go crazy. :surprised

Oh well. Gotta do some GI faking then.

Profane

06-08-2004, 10:15 PM

or try to work with alpha mask to soften the shadows...
I think i saw a good tutorials from Gnomon about what i'm saying....

the first one was Gnomon Texture lecture #2
and the other one was
Gnomon -Rendering 2-Shadows....

rock

06-08-2004, 10:40 PM

There are 2 ways to soften raytraced shadows:

1. Adjust the raytraced shadow attributes Light Radius and Shadow Rays. On the material node, there's also a Shadow Attenuation to further control the shadows.

2. Use mental ray area lights for GI, which achieves the same as above.

fr3drik

06-09-2004, 07:02 AM

Thanks for the tips guys! I just scaled up my area lights in the scene (I'm using MR now) and voila, I got soft and nice shadows on my background shader... I can't believe I didn't try that.
:beer:

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