[Irinikus]

The only primitive that I'm missing is the tube, which has proven very useful to me in the past. (Is there a way to easily create a tube?)


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<B><U>EDIT:</U></B>

I managed to fabricate a tube by modifying a torus:


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[kikems]

Great, I love to view IRIX 3D apps in action.

[Irinikus]

The finished product:


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[Intuition]

This is a pretty good start.

First thing I would do is set the area lights decay to linear. This will give you a nice falloff. This will also reduce the brightness a bit so you'll have to raise the intensity to compensate.

Then don't use shadow maps. Use raytrace shadows in the light's shadow options and start at 8 and work up to 16 samples once you have the levels as you like. You'll need to switch on raytracing in the render options dialogue and have at least 2 rays for shadows, etc.

You can also scale up the area lights to get a softer shadow. Often you can just use the high or production render preset to turn on all the parameters together.

[Irinikus]

Thanks for the advice!

I’m going to increase the model’s complexity and implement your suggestions.

Let’s see how it goes.

[Irinikus]

Here are some images of the model with increased complexity and with raytracing applied, however, I have still used shadow mapping and will experiment with retraced shadows in the future, as I wasn't happy with the results that I was getting.


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<B><U>EDIT:</U></B>

Here's an image with raytraced shadows (Decay set to linear, 2 rays with 8X sampling), it took more than 10 min to render, while the other images took less than 30 seconds.


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Here's the same image with shadow mapping: (took a fraction of the time to render, but does have reduced quality)


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[Intuition]

I am baffled why there is no soft shadows.

Its like it is using soft shadow render time but giving you a full sharp shadow.

These are area lights as far as I could see. They should produce soft shadow falloff if you scale them up even a little and use the raytrace features in both the area light attributes and the render options panel. Simply turning on raytracing. If your shadow rays are between 8-16 they should anti-alias pretty decent as well.

Are there directional lights or only area lights?

Here is a basic cube with a single area light and raytrace shadows.

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If they are spotlights you need to set a few parameters.

Set penumbra angle to like 10.

Under raytrace shadows.. if it is a directional or spotlight you'll need to set the light radius up above zero to see a sharp shadow fall off to a soft shadow. The larger the number the faster the shadow will fall off to soft.

[Irinikus]

I made use of spotlights, so That’s probably the problem, I’ll try setting the parameters for the lights next time.

[Intuition]

Start with a low number in the light radius. Like 1.0 and maybe move upwards to 6. or 7.0 if you really want serious fall off softening.

The softer the shadow the closer to 16 rays you'll need. But start at 8 and see how noisy it is and move up from there. The render times will probably be the same. With spot lights you don't gain from scaling them up in the channel box.. only from using the light radius number will it soften shadows.

Area lights do this from the get go but need raytracing on to work with softness. Then you simply scale up the light in the channel box or using "R" scale gimble. Larger = Softer

[Irinikus]

Here's the result (same image) with the penumbra set to 10, a light radius of 1 and 3 rays:


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The shadows now certainly look a bit more realistic!

I'm busy rendering with 8 rays, will post when its done for comparative purposes. (It's now taking for ever!)