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What's the deal with shadows

cristabellegarciacristabellegarcia Posts: 0
in New Users

Hi! I'm having such a hard time. HELP! Lighting looks good in smooth shaded or textured shaded previews but when I look at the rendered preview (and when I did spot rendering) it doesn't have anything to do with the lighting I designed. I've been digging into the wiki and I was reading about shadows and shadow properties; when I go to my lights, I don't have the shadow properties enabled. I don't know if this has anything to do with it but why is the shadow property disabled? Context: I'm entirely new to this and I started a week ago. THANKS!

Comments

  • macleanmaclean Posts: 2,438

    A lot depends on which render engine you're using. First, go to Window> Panes> Render Settings and in the Engine field it will probably say NVIDIA Iray or 3Delight. If it's Nvidia, you can use the dropdown menu in the viewport (the 2nd icon) to select Nvidia Iray. That will give you a real-time preview of the lights.

    Secondly, you need to be sure your lights are Photometric. Select a light and go to Parameters> Light and check that Photometric Mode is On. In the viewport's camera dropdown menu, your light should be listed at the bottom of the cameras, You can select it and look through it, then move it around to wherever you like.

    Thirdly, if everything else works, but you want to tweak the shadows, in Parameters> Light you can set the type and size of Light Geometry. The default is Point, but probably Disc or Rectangle will give better results. You can change Height and Width from the default 10. Larger = softer shadows.

  • odasteinodastein Posts: 606
    edited September 2018

    Well, I was precisely coming to ask about the opposite problem : an object is casting a shadow on the face of a character, and I want it to go away (and there's no way I'm moving this object, I had too much difficulties puting it where it is). How do I *prevent* this object from casting a shadow?  (In last resort, I'll move the light source, but I'd rather not).

    Post edited by odastein on
  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 96,849
    odastein said:

    Well, I was precisely coming to ask about the opposite problem : an object is casting a shadow on the face of a character, and I want it to go away (and there's no way I'm moving this object, I had too much difficulties puting it where it is). How do I *prevent* this object from casting a shadow?  (In last resort, I'll move the light source, but I'd rather not).

    In Iray your options are limited. You could do two renders, with and without the object, and blend them to adjust the shadow intensity (you could do this in one two-pass render using the Canvasses tab of the Advanced page of Render Settings). You could also add a light between object and surface, to try to fill the shadow in, but avoiding odd edges might be tricky.

  • PaintboxPaintbox Posts: 1,633

    In IRAY you have to start thinking more like a photographer. You can't hide stuff in IRL either. Photographers sometimes bounce light, or have an extra flashlight to fill in shadows. Which is what Richard is offering with his second solution. It's tricky no doubt, especially if you're new to rendering.

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