Hair Self Shadows with directional light

[Duncan]

There was a bug with older versions of Maya where one needed to have some non-pfx(i.e. hair) casting shadows in the scene to trigger the shadow map build... perhaps you are hitting this issue. Another possibility is that the shadow map covers too large an area, for example if you have a larger shadow casting ground plane with autoFocus ON for the light. If so you might try turning off useAutoFocus and setting the widthFocus by hand(so that the shadow just maps to the area of interest. Or you could turn off casting of shadows on the ground plane.

Duncan

[rhythmone]

Interesting... yes, I am on maya 8.0 OSX (non-intel version) so maybe the version is causing it cause at this point all I have is a proxy head model in the scene (no ground plane, no nothing).

Can you elaborate on the non-pfx casting shadows? You mean like an object that casts a shadow on the hair... or another hairSystem that outputs geo vs. pfx?

Because as a test I did place a torus above the hair just to see if I could get some shadows going but it didn't work. BTW this was all with directional lights, the moment I switched to spot lights everything is fine.

[Duncan]

If spotlights work then it suggests the problem is with the autoFocus of the directional light. (the region that bounds the shadow map)

One other thing that confuses me sometimes is having a large object in the scene( like the room one is in ) blocking the directional light, because it is essentially infinitely far away.

Duncan

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