Hybrid shadow

#1

Has anyone else tried making hybrid shadows in AM? I just did an experiment and it worked quite well.

I made two lights in a model (children of a bone). One of them is a bulb with raytraced shadows and is large so the shadows fall-off with distance. The other is a klieg with z-buffer shadows which are quite soft.

The idea is that I can get the best of both worlds.

The z-buffer renders fast and has nice smooth edges but can get screwed around the base of objects.

The raytraced light is good for the base of objects where shadows are more detailed but can look too sharp elsewhere.

I have attached an image and a zipped project.

#2

Ooooh! Brilliant! :thumbsup:

Sincerely,

Carl Raillard

#3

clever idea!

#4

very good idea. I’ll have to play with that. You could probably get away with less rays if you used something like that.

#5

Glad you like it :slight_smile:

Of course you can make it so that the kleig only casts a shadow (no odd circular light). This is probably what I would usually do if there were other lights there to fill in the shadow more.

What I would really like is the ability to set the fall-off for the raytraced shadow independantly of its size. However, the effect seems to work reasonably well as is. I will have to do some tests with more challenging geometry. It would be great to see what you guys can do with it.

#6

Oh yeah, it wouldn’t work the same with multiple ray ray-traced shadows as they don’t have the fall-off. Having said that, I imagine there would still be benefits.

#7

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