Soft shadows?

[victor]

Can anybody explain to me how i can achieve soft shadow's with final gather. I use here the physical sun / sky. But renders always end up very grainy at the edges of shadows.

I tried changing pretty much every setting there is but i can't seem to get it really smooth.
It has nothing to do with final gather. It's based on the light radius (angle for directional lights) in the shadow settings for the light. How smooth the edges are depends on the number of rays.
For the Physical sun, you want to increase the shadow samples.

[mech7]

Thanks for the help but i can't seem to find the shadow passes where is this located? I did find the angle and ray's, but they seem to have no effect on the shadow when i increase them.

[victor]

If you are using the physical sun with the new mental ray shaders it has its own settings that override the light.

Go back to the IBL node where you created the physical environment, and now when you click the button there again, you wil have an edit option in the menu. That opens the UI, and you can find the shadow samples setting for the sun there.

[mech7]

:thumbsup:Thanks this is much better

[victor]

I'm glad you found it, but you definitely don't need 1200 samples. :argh:

[mech7]

:)hmm well i tried lower values but it still came out a little grainy? is there any other way to keep it lower and avoid it ?

[victor]

Well, once you turn up anti-aliasing in the render settings, that will help too. For a light angle (shadow softness for sun), you shouldn't need more than 10-20 samples for the shadow.

Sure, you can always crank up sample levels to obscene amounts and get nice pictures, but the goal is always to use the minimum that you need.

Three and a half minutes for a 640x480 image of a sphere on a plane with low anti-aliasing is a bit much. Just think what will happen when you start adding detail at a higher resolution.



Oh, and you also seem to be missing the AE templates for the architectural shaders (or they are installed wrong). Your sun attributes should look like this:

[cpan]

Oh, and you also seem to be missing the AE templates for the architectural shaders (or they are installed wrong). Your sun attributes should look like this:

nope, thats the level of integration they did in 8.5 heh :P
will update the scripts for 8.5 when i'll have some time (they
allready work but there are some corrections to do to them) :)

[djx]

Thanks yashu!
Your effort is most appreciated here. :thumbsup:

[victor]

nope, thats the level of integration they did in 8.5 heh :P
will update the scripts for 8.5 when i'll have some time (they
allready work but there are some corrections to do to them) :)I got to try 8.5 soon after my post here, and realized that was probably it.

It's sad that they didn't put it into the last release because they had to make SIGGRAPH, and then in the half year after, this is all they could come up with. :shrug:

I'm glad you're working on a new version, but I will probably be skipping 8.5 if the only feature I was looking forward to comes in a form that was pretty much available with the previous version.

Out of curiosity, will scenes created with your setup in 8.0 translate directly to future versions of Maya with it built-in?

[cpan]

Out of curiosity, will scenes created with your setup in 8.0 translate directly to future versions of Maya with it built-in?

yep, the physEnv setup is roughly the same as the 8.5 one, just the interface differs ;)

I'm glad you're working on a new version, but I will probably be skipping 8.5 if the only feature I was looking forward to comes in a form that was pretty much available with the previous version.

not much a new version, but just some small tweaks for maya 8.5. Probably i'll take a look on it this weekend, if time allows it :)


though regarding mentalray, in maya 8.5 you get working FG modes (faster and better quality than before) and nicer interface (though some parts of the UI are a bit exagerated imo)


oh btw victor, you're using the initial version of the physicalEnv 4 maya, get the last one from here (http://www.4shared.com/file/8212053/26d8948f/archmat.html)

[Exo7]

I thought this adventure of yours was over, yashu, now that Maya 8.5 is out. Obviously I was wrong :cool:

Regarding that... issue... well... er... :eek:

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