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gaggle
10-17-2002, 09:54 AM
Hey all,

I'm fairly new to Maya, so I hope this isn't going to be the mother of all newbie questions. I'm experiencing some.. trouble, when using a directional light. The scenario is supersimple: I just need a shadow from a painteffects tree.
So I've made the tree, a ground to receive shadow, set up the directional light, turned on shadowcasting where appropriate. But the shadow comes out extremly blurry. This is with shadow map (DMap Resolution) size set to 4096.

It seems the light is spreading its shadow map way too thin on account of casting it all over my groundplane or the likes. Which seems fairly reasonable, as I haven't done anything to limit where it casts its shadows yet.

But here comes the issues, because I can't find any settings to limit where it casts its shadows? There are no barn door settings that I can find.. no slider that defines in what area the shadows are cast from.. I haven't been able to find help in the helpfiles, so I turn to this forum in hope of good and jolly news :)
GrafOrlok
10-17-2002, 08:07 PM
I'm sorry, but you will not find any barn doors or sliders to limit the shadow casting. The directional light uses your whole scene size to calculate the depth map, so it will get pretty lowres. I suggest you use a spotlight instead.

In no way a newbie question, you're already on the track by knowing you need to limit your shadow casting ;)
alx
10-20-2002, 01:12 PM
Well the RT shadow will just take to long to render with no need.
PFX has this little attributes that you can change so that you will save the time to render RT shadows..
try this:
under the PFX attributes there is an attribute which says. "use real lights" and another wich says "fake shadow".
what i suggest you do is this.

for the "fake shadow". turn it on.
and for the shadow direction the most accurate way to get the right shadow direction is to connect the directional light's (lightdata) (light direction) to the direction of your fake shadow.

and

for the "use real lights". turn it off
and connect the directional light's (lightdata) (lightdirection) to the PFX lightdirection.
i beleieve this should do the trick..

the reason why it best to turn off use real lights is mainly because if for example you have 20 lights in your scene, all of these lights will affect your PFX brushes.. which might give you some not very nice looking results..

well hope that helps out..
i hope i got it right..
sincerely

Alx
:wavey:
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