Please Help! Alphas and D-map shadows

[Flo]

unfortunately ,there is nothing like a clipmap in maya.
:annoyed:

[kmp3d]

I think this may be what you are looking for.......

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/transparency_shadows/trans_shadow.html

[eric3dee]

no clipmaps, huh? As soon as I think Maya has got all other software trumped, I begin finding small holes. :)
The gnomon tut was exactly what I needed, but the process seems like a long and time consuming process of essentially creating a clipmap! Maybe someone from Alias is reading this right now and getting a clue about a great adition to Maya. Thanks for the help.

[playmesumch00ns]

Been thinking about this as it would be useful. Unfortunatley I don't think it's possible to do with Maya's API. The shadow maps are calculated before the shading is evaluated for the scene. I'm not sure how lightwave does it, but it require a bit of a u-turn in Maya's rendering pipeline to get this to work.

you never know tho:hmm:

[mattwood]

I don't have time right now to test this or write a full 'tutorial' but it might be possible to render your own depth maps by placing a camera where the light is. The advantage to rendering your own depth maps is that you can use the transparency options in the camera's attributes to make the depth map 'see' the transparency. If you can get these depth maps back into the spotlight the problem is solved. Sort of...

[Blur1]

Try a camera in the same location as the light, render the alpha only of the bird (I'm assuming it's a bird because of the feather textures) which will take into account your transparency maps. Experiment with a texture in Shadow Colour attribute for the light, projecting as camera projection from the camera that shares its location, all same settings so it lines up properly. Make sure that only the ground plane is recieving the shadow. You will have to invert the alpha before you lay it back in as a Shadow Colour map. also you will want to mimic shadow falloff and soft edges in your compositing program before loading it back in. If the bird is moving then you need to render an animated alpha then of course treat it to look like a shadow in yout comp package (falloff, soft edges etc)
This should work, if not then just create a separate material with the camera projection texture and render a separate shadow pass for compositing.
Anyway that doesn't cover everything but you should get my drift.

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