Softer Shadows?
Scotty Z
Posts: 44
I seem to remember that I used to know how to do this, or at least had a work around for it.
I'd like the shadows to have edges that are a little softer. Hard edges work fine outside on a sunny day, but indoors where light is bouncing off other surfaces can make the edges a little fuzzier, that's what I'm looking for: the settings in my lights that can produce this effect.
Thanks!
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In DAZ Studio lights have a separate 'shadow softness' dial, if dialed to 2% it gives nicely soft shadow edges.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I don't see much, if any, difference when I changed this seeing.
The work around I've come up with is to add some additional lights to the scene (without any shadows at all) and they are sort of softening the shadows. They don't have super sharp edges anymore.
Shadow softness works only with ray traced shadows.
Raytraced is the kind of shadow I'm using so... I dunno. What should the Shadow Bias be set to?
Don't adjust the Shadow Bias unless your shadow seems to be "separated" from the surface if falls on.
Test your Shadow Softness by dialing up to 5, 10 or 20% just to see if actually works at all. If not, then make sure that:
1) You are rendering in software mode (3Delight) rather than any of the hardware modes
2) Your light that casts the shadow is set to ray-traced mode
Shadow bias determines how far the shadows are from the actual figure casting them. A high bias can make a character disconnected with their shadow, while a low bias keeps their feet firmly on the ground.
Regarding your light softness. How many lights do you have in your scene? Having very few lights means there's no extra to fill in the gaps, which can lead to harshness. Unlike real light, the lights in 3Delight don't automatically bounce and reflect in the way you'd expect, so you can't use a single light to flood fill an entire room aside from special shader lights like UberEnvironment.
To remedy this, try using filler lights at a lower intensity aimed to get the parts of the image which would otherwise be unreachable. If you don't activate shadows on these filler lights, they will ignore walls and illuminate everything that the first light missed.
Shadow softness works with both Deep Shadowmaps AND Raytraced shadows
All images...
Scene: Plane, sphere, single spotlight.
Studio 4.5.1.56
Image 1: Deep Shadowmap, Softness 0%
Image 2: DSM, Softness 100%
Image 3: Raytraced, Softness 0%
Image 4: Raytraced, Softness 100%
Has it always? I was sure I'd tried softness with mapped shadows in the past and it had failed to work, but I haven't even tried recently. Well, to partially answer my own question it works in the final version of DS 3
It's worked, as far as I can tell from my collected renders, since the first version of 4.0...in other words since 3Delight 10.x.
I always do soft shadows with Shadow Maps. As far as I know, since ever. :gulp:
You can also turn off the limits to get shadows as soft as you want.
...I've used it a lot with DSMs as Raytracing on my old system was a sure trip to a render crash.
Shadow softness has always worked with Shadow Maps but in early versions of the 3Delight render engine it had to turned up to ridiculous levels before the effect was noticeable.
..in the pic above I used 2% softness.
I have almost exclusively used shadow map unless I wanted a point light shadow, and I can't remember a time when there wasn't a softer option, going back to beta days.
On a related note...I seem to recall being able to adjust the shadow darkness but I don't know if it was on standard lights or third party(or if I am imagining it). Can anybody help?
At the risk of being wrong again, I'm pretty sure the standard lights have never had a shadow intensity setting - the trick was to use two lights, one casting shadows and one not, so that the combined intensity added up to the desired value and the non-shadow casting light had the desired shadow intensity. The uber Lights do have a shadow intensity setting, however.
Nope Richard you are right about that part. ;)
Thank you, Richard, that must have been what I was thinking of.
..that's what I did in the pic I posted. Used one full intensity "main light" with shadow" two low intensity rim lights one low intensity backlight one low intensity ambient from below and one low intensity ambient fill from above.