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Greetings,
Just looking at the images, it feels like maybe your characters and objects are partially below the ground plane?
-- Morgan
No this isn't the problem. Both characters have their ytranslate set at 0. I've added a slim cylinder primitive and put it on the the world's x axis.
The problem seems related to a positive z value of the shadows...
That is really strange, especially if the other products aren't doing that as they should all be using the same shadow catcher. Do other presets from the Monterey pack do that for you? It looks like an issue that comes up when using a wide angle lens close to a mesh, but that comes up with an "disregarded during eye split" error that isn't mentioned in the log you posted. Almost looks like the plane has been moved so that it's behind the objects and not actually under them.
EDIT: Never mind, the eye split thing IS in your error report (I double checked after posting and I must have overlooked it previously). This is an issue that DS has which is kind of confusing for a lot of reasons, it has something to do with the polygon count of objects the camera is viewing and very sharp angles as well as the scale of those objects. Try reducing the size of your shadow catching plane so that it's smaller but not too small for your shadows to properly land on it, something like 10% should work.
Here's another render, using another of your presets, shadow catcher scale set to 10%, and rendered with the default camera. There's not much in this scene. The two figures, the cylinder to the right, a camera and the items from the ProSet :-/
It's definitely the shadow catcher from the Monterey Sets.
Here's the same scene, but now using the shadow catcher from the Urban Recreation set:
Well it's good you found a solution. I'm going to be updating the sets I currently have out before too long, when I do I'll go over and check to see what about the Monterey plane is triggering the eye-split error and probably just replace it with the Urban Rec one. Before editing my previous post I loaded the BBQ set and put a scene together along the same lines as yours and had the same issue, scaling the ground plane down fixed it but I believe I had also applied Sub-D to it. There are a lot of factors that make the eye-split error happen, if you'd like to continue trouble shooting it try applying Sub-D to your plane with it's scale at 10% (like I mentioned before poly count contributes to eye-split so the denser mesh should help a bit). If that doesn't change anything keep scaling your plane down, raising your Sub-D level or zooming your camera in until you stop getting the eye-split error showing up in your log. Changing the plane to DAZ Default and making it opaque would let you see what parts of the mesh are actually disappearing.
Thanks Zig Zag for pointing out this issue and thanks DT for the explanation. This is interesting. I was able to reproduce it also. In my case, scaling to 10% solved the problem. Switching to one of the Yosemite shadow catchers at 100% also worked. The Monterey City Hall shadows are normally very soft (20%), so the error is less noticeable. For testing, I turned the shadow softness down from the normal 20 to 0 to make the problem really show up.
Yep it's true that the shadows are normally much softer. But when I started using the set I noticed that the shadows looked odd anyway, that's why I started to investigate this issue. DimensionTheory, I'll do your suggested tests tomorrow, I'm busy with other things right now :-).
Dimension Theory,
Here's some additional info:
You wrote earlier that I try to reduce the scale of the shadow catcher to 10%, then to do the tests again. So what I did earlier was to scale down the X and Z values. And the result was that the error still occured.
But if I do scale down the shadow catcher on all three axes (x,y,z), the error doesn't occur anymore. In that case I don't need to apply subdivision either. Hope this helps...
And if I reset the default shader on the shadow catcher I see that the front half (positive z value) is discarded...
Hi,
It seems there was an update on the Monterey Pro Sets for Carrara. However, on my system, the installation of the update fails. The messages in the Error Log aren't helpful:
Installing product : HDR Pro Sets Monterey (Part 1) Ca
Product installation failed : HDR Pro Sets Monterey (Part 1) Ca
Install Queue finished in 0 min 0.0 sec.
Any idea what I could try?
That probably means the download was corrupt, as they are quite large files. Try deleting the package(s) and re-downloading.
Mike,
I already tried three times to delete, redownload and reinstall. Doesn't change anything. I'm on a Windows 7 64 Bit. I didn't experience this problem with the HDR Pro Sets before the last update. I also deleted the DS version of the Monterey Pro Sets, redownloaded and reinstalled and that one installed without a problem. Could it be that the set located on the DAZ servers is corrupt?
It's possible, I don't have that one to check. You may want to submit a ticket to Technical Support so they can check it.
Hi Mike,
I've submitted a support request. I'll report their findings back here.