CGTalk - Soft Shadows

mrichter16

03-24-2010, 03:20 PM

Hi there, I hope somebody can help me with this. I am trying to get soft shadows using Vue Xstream and Vray. I know your initial thought is that it is easy... maybe it is, but I'm really struggling. I'll outline my attempts so far so that hopefully someone can see what I'm trying to do! The first thing was to create a simple scene inside Max using Xstream. A default atmosphere, and then a tree on the ground plane. Now, I can get soft shadows using the softness feature on object properties window. Great. Problem is, when the shadow is cast onto a non-Vue object, it has hard shadows. So, playing about with the raytrace and shadow map options in the edit object window renders the same results. So, I tried a different approach. To select the manual light paramater option in the native light conversion window, and then set the usual Vray Area shadows in the Max rollout with the sun selected. This works perfectly when rendering a shadow from non-Vue object onto a non-Vue object. The problem comes when you render the shadow of a tree for example onto a non-Vue plane. You get two shadows. One from the area-shadows from the Max settings, and one with hard light from the Vue settings. So I turned off the shadows in the Vue edit object window. Now you only get one shadow which is soft, which is what I want, but the Vue object no-longer recieves any shadows from itself! ARGHHHHH! please help, I'm sure there's an easy way to get soft-shadows to be 100% compatible between the two renderers? thank you in advance. Mike

just to summarise. I need either a completely different solution so that Vray and Vue are working together casting and recieving soft area shadows, or I need to be able to have Vue objects cast AND recieve shadows from the native renderer settings. thanks again.