Shadow default settings

[JDex]

By default... shadows are raytraced. You have to activate a few settings to do shadow maps.

I generally use no shadow maps, because I mostly use Area Light shadows... also my personal experiences with shadow maps in general have shown them to be slower (I've never been able to understand why) than non-area shadows. I spent some time analyzing it with the verbose render logging back in 4.2 and just saw hundreds and hundreds of Calculating Shadow Map messages. It was probably lack of understanding and setup at the time, but I just moved on to area lights because I needed them and haven't looked back.

Anywho, probably not the most helpful post, but just thought I'd share my experiences as this render wraps up.

[Pixelmech]

Any insight is helpful. Are you saying you use area lights for all your lighting - internal/external? I actually thought area lights were very much render intensive, but I can see the benefits of using them.

[CiaranM]

Ray-traced is default. The only situation where shadow maps would be advantageous would be versus area lights, or when shadow map baking could be used.
Normal ray-traced shadows are very fast, and area lights are often not too slow themselves.
I find shadow map building to be quite slow and if you have to rebuild every frame you may loose any advantage. Also, XSI shadow maps are lacking in optimization parameters, namely a focus angle. This would limit the shadow map projection to only those parts of the scene strictly necessary, thus saving build time...

[CiaranM]

I actually thought area lights were very much render intensive, but I can see the benefits of using them.

As your area lights become larger and their shadows softer you will need much more sampling and render time. In such a situation shadow maps will be more useful.

[Chris-TC]

I don't see how shadow maps could substitute area lights.

The main reason why I use area lights is because they give the CG lights an actual size, thus producing correctly blurred drop shadows. And the amount of blur is not uniform, it's based on the distance to the object and to the light.

I don't think you can reproduce this behaviour with shadow maps, but if you can I'd love to know.

[CiaranM]

Of course, they relate to area lights in merely that they produce a 'soft' shadow. They do not accurately shadow as do area lights.
It also depends on the visual style you are going for. If accurate contact and distanced-based blurring of shadows is your thing, then you need area lights. Simple as that.
If not, then plausible (within a certain context) soft shadows can be achieved with shadow maps.

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