CGTalk - pfx shadow casting

h0tice

09-22-2004, 02:43 AM

hi there,

so here is the situation:

i got a pfx with cast shadow on, and i have a plane to receive shadow, i turned on the cast shadow of light, i turned off the cast shadow of the plane, and then i rendered the scene, but unfortunately the pfx didn't cast any shadow in the plane.

now i turned on the cast shadow of the plane and rendered the scene, and now the shadow of the pfx appeared.

why is it that i need to turn on the cast shadow of the object before maya render the shadow of the pfx, isn't that if you have receive shadow on in your object it will have the shadow of the shadow caster? why is this in pfx, is this a bug, or i am just missing a workaround here?

thanx a lot

Castiglion

09-22-2004, 02:23 PM

Is your plane self shadowing?

I think I ran into this a couple of weeks ago and I thought it was strange too. I was trying to get a Paint fx shadow render pass with a UseBackground shader, but my problem was that the surface my painfx were casting shadows on was a detailed terrain and would self shadow if "cast shadow" was turned on...thus ruining my paint fx shadow pass. I think what I ended up doing was applying a white lambert to the surface that I wanted to catch my shadows and turning up the ambience all the way so it would not self shadow, but would recieve the paint fx shadows. I then just used the RGB render of this as a mask in After Effects to do my paint effects shadows. Thats probably not a very good way of doing this, but it solved my problem.

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